Deepika Padukone sat on the Cannes jury in 2022, wearing a saree that read as politically loud and aesthetically flawless. The image was always going to travel. Nobody had quite figured out how far.

The clip landed on a Thursday. By Friday morning, Mumbai's fashion desks were on deadline. By Saturday, the meme economy had three separate remixes in rotation: one sincere, one ironic, one in Tamil that went harder than the original.

This is not a story about a saree. This is a story about a distribution map. The Indian star travels internationally. Fine, we knew that. The internet then re-localises the travelled image back into domestic relevance, in six languages, inside seventy-two hours. That second leg is the new thing. That is the leg most of the industry has not priced in.