A red Porsche comes down the road. The driver is not in a leather jacket or streetwear. She is in a salwar kameez, her dupatta pulled over her head.
The clip has passed a million views, and it has made Nikki Dahiya, a Delhi-based content creator, the latest person online to be called a “desi baddie.” Her Instagram following is above 1.8 million, and her profile is full of videos of her behind the wheel of expensive cars. This was no one-off stunt. It was simply the video that caught on.
Comments piled up quickly. Many viewers used the “desi baddie” label affectionately, and others praised how easily she handled the car.
India Today put the reaction down to a stereotype many people did not know they held, that fast cars go with leather jackets and racing gloves and a particular kind of driver. Dahiya’s clip, it wrote, “flips that script in a matter of seconds.”
The outlet also tied the attention to a wider change in how women show up online. More of them, it said, are moving into motorsports, biking, entrepreneurship and adventure travel, areas once seen as male territory.
