We carry around a private map of the world in our heads, and it is almost entirely visual.
Not a neat, political-map kind of thing, but a messy collage of landmarks, logos, people, colours, and half-updated facts that only make sense to us.
Think about how you remember directions and places. “Take a left at the banyan tree” or “after the petrol pump, you’ll see a red medical store.”
The brain remembers roads not as lines, but as sequences: this building on the right, that shop on the left, this stall where I once bought chai, that corner where I once got lost.
Over time, these cues become fixed: the blue board, the yellow wall, the handwritten sign that tells you you’re on the right path.
So when a landmark shuts down or repaints itself, you almost feel betrayed, because your internal GPS has to be rewritten from scratch.
That’s how I navigate my neighbourhood, which I have seen change over the last 30 years of my life in Malad West. Memories erased because the geography that they were set it, changed.
This does not stop with roads. My brain files away products and people in a similar visual shorthand: the shape of a shampoo bottle, the colour of a biscuit packet, the way someone’s hair looked the first time you met them.
So when a brand changes its logo, packaging, or colours, it is not “just design,” it is someone editing your mental database without your permission.
The CNBC logo, BMW, Rolls-Royce, the old idea of what an “Airtel red” or “Vodafone dog” meant to you: all of it lives somewhere in that mental archive, under a folder called “obvious,” until one day it is not obvious anymore.
Generations, same song, different video
Think of “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara.”
When the title pops up in my head, I see the newer “Phir Mile Sur” version with Shah Rukh Khan, Shahid Kapoor, Abhishek Bachchan, Deepika Padukone and others, because that is the one television imprinted on my generation.
My parents and my brother, on the other hand, immediately think of the original Doordarshan video, shorter, less glossy, and deeply tied to their idea of what “national integration” looked and sounded like.
Same song, same intent, but two entirely different mental films playing in our heads.
This is why generational conversations often feel like miscommunication rather than disagreement.
We are not arguing about the song, we are arguing about which visual memory is the default, which version counts as “real.”
When the world updates and we don’t
Here is the interesting bit: not every file in this mental map gets updated.
The brain updates information most reliably when a memory is recalled and then rewritten; if a fact just sits there unused, it can remain frozen in time.
So sometimes, if you ask me who the Chief Minister of Maharashtra is, my mouth may still rush to an older name, because that folder has not been opened and re-saved in a long time. No one has needed that piece of information from me, so my brain never bothered to run the update.
Meanwhile, brand logos, app icons, and celebrity line-ups get refreshed in my memory constantly, because social media, hoardings, and screens keep pinging those images back into attention.
The result is a strange split-screen: my political or civic knowledge might be outdated, but my streaming platforms and consumer brands are absolutely up to date.
A world that keeps rewriting itself
All of this leaves me with a slightly surreal feeling: the world is constantly being redrawn in real time, and my brain is constantly playing catch up.
Every time a shop shutters, a logo changes, a jingle gets remixed with new faces, or a classic video like “Mile Sur” is re-shot for a new generation, an invisible editor walks through my head and quietly rearranges the files.
But some things never get that editor’s visit.
Old ministers, old phone numbers, old jingles, old bus routes remain, lying around like ghost shortcuts in a city you no longer live in, but still know by heart.
There may not be a neat “takeaway” here.
Just this: each of us is moving through the same physical world with slightly different internal versions of it, patched together by what we noticed, when we noticed it, and what life has forced us to update.