Why everything feels more expensive now
Shrinkflation, corporate greed and the quiet extraction reshaping everyday spending.
I'm Neelam, a freelance journalist, presenter and producer making documentaries, investigations and social-first storytelling.
After 8 years at The Guardian in London, I'm now based in south east Asia, working independently across journalism, documentaries and editorial strategy.


Some of my films look at giant industries and the forces shaping modern life. Others follow the strange ways people eat, travel, consume and live around them. Quite often they overlap.
Writing about culture, travel and the strange ways people, places and power shape each other.
Playful little investigations into food, trends, status and modern social rituals.
Sometimes this spirals into hosting things, ending up somewhere unexpected, or trying to redesign the interiors of a restaurant. Also a co-founder of Nosey TV, cheeky films by nosey girls.
A mini-doc exploring why half of East London suddenly became emotionally attached to suspiciously cheap natural wine.
Made with Scarlet & Bryony · Nosey TV, cheeky films by nosey girls.
A lot of my work starts with a fairly ordinary part of everyday life — food, housing, healthcare, social media, a weird trend — and ends up asking who benefits from things working this way.
I'm less attached to the format than the story itself. Whether that ends up being a short social video, a documentary, a reported written feature, a podcast or something harder to explain.
Over the last eight years at The Guardian, I worked across video, social and written journalism, helping grow It's Complicatedfrom a brand new YouTube channel into the paper's fastest-growing channel.
I also spent several years running and producing content for The Guardian's Instagram and TikTok accounts, which taught me a huge amount about attention, emotion and why some stories connect while others completely die on arrival.
Before that, I wrote social-first news and features at UNILAD for an audience of more than 50 million people a day.
Along the way I've also worked with BBC World Service, BBC Three, BFI, Sheffield DocFest, WePresent, gal-dem, GQ, Hyphen, Frieze and HuffPost.
Outside of journalism, I'm usually thinking about my yet-to-exist supper club, applying to be on Interior Design Masters, and forcing my friends to try suspiciously blue drinks.
I work with publishers, documentary teams, charities, campaigns and creators with something meaningful to say, helping them shape stories that connect with modern audiences without losing depth, nuance or personality.