``FF Khelna Hai'' by Arpit Bala as Cultural Text: Gaming, Hustle Culture, and Class Anxiety in Contemporary India

Digital gaming has emerged as a central cultural space for economically constrained youth in India, offering not only entertainment but also aspirations of skill-based success, recognition, and perceived mobility. This paper presents an interpretive cultural reading of the song ``FF Khelna Hai'' by Arpit Balabantaray (popularly known as Arpit Bala), treating its lyrics as a culturally expressive text that narrates everyday experiences of gaming, masculinity, hierarchy, and hustle culture. The paper examines how the song sequentially articulates sibling authority, infrastructural scarcity, performance metrics, platform aspiration, and competitive hostility within digital gaming environments. Rather than offering empirical claims about gaming behavior, the analysis explores how the lyrics condense and dramatize recognizable social tensions surrounding meritocracy, effort, and class anxiety. The paper argues that gaming, as narrated in the song, functions as a closed system of symbolic mobility: effort is rewarded through metrics, visibility, and in-game status, while material and structural advancement remain largely out of reach. By foregrounding popular music as a site of cultural insight, this shows how gaming culture reflects and sustains the contradictions between aspiration and immobility in contemporary digital India.