Exhibit: Mumbai's Magazine of Technology, Automobiles and Lifestyle

Exhibit is an English-language monthly magazine from Mumbai that covers technology, automobiles, fashion and lifestyle — and deliberately puts them in the same pages. Published by the Exhibit Group and sold in print and digital editions, it reviews the phones, laptops, cars and wearables its readers are about to buy, photographs film and fashion personalities alongside the gadgets of the moment, and has built around the magazine a wider business of events, awards and influencer marketing. Its website is exhibit.tech, and its print editions are sold through its own online store.

The founding idea, which the group still states as its core, is a unison of auto, tech, lifestyle and everything in between. Where a conventional technology magazine stops at specifications, Exhibit has always treated a smartphone launch, a supercar and a fashion shoot as parts of the same reader's life — an positioning that has kept it on Indian newsstands since 2005.

Overview

Exhibit calls itself India's prime-selling magazine in its niche, a claim it supports with longevity: the Exhibit Group dates the magazine's run at over eighteen years, across print, digital and social platforms. It is a consumer magazine rather than a trade journal — written for buyers and enthusiasts rather than for the technology industry's channel partners — and its tone is glossy, visual and celebrity-aware, closer to a lifestyle title that tests gadgets than to a laboratory review journal.

Around the magazine, the Exhibit Group runs events and intellectual properties in technology, automobiles, fashion and lifestyle, a podcast under the Exhibit Magazine name, video content, and an influencer-marketing practice that the group describes as one of the biggest names in that territory in India. The magazine is thus both a publication and the flagship of a small media group.

History and Founding

The Exhibit Group gives its founding year as 2005, in Mumbai. The magazine was founded by Ramesh Somani, who remains its founder, chief editor and publisher, and who also leads the wider Exhibit Group as its chief executive. Building a technology-and-lifestyle magazine in the India of 2005 meant building it before the smartphone era: the title's early world was one of feature phones, MP3 players, early laptops and a fast-growing Indian car market, and it grew up alongside the consumer technology boom that followed.

Two later milestones reshaped the group. In 2020, Exhibit Group acquired BBC TopGear magazine for the Indian territory, adding the world's biggest motoring brand to the same Mumbai stable as Exhibit itself, and the two publications are now managed together. And through the 2010s the group steadily extended the magazine into live properties — the Tech Fashion Tour, first reported in 2016 in its second season, and the Top 100 Digital Influencers awards, whose inaugural edition was held in Mumbai in June 2018 — turning readers and cover personalities into a year-round community.

Publisher and Ownership

Exhibit is published in Mumbai by the privately held Exhibit Group, also referred to in its businesses as Exhibit Technologies. The group lists its size in the range of fifty-one to two hundred employees and its specialities as influencer marketing, production, talent management, digital marketing, social media and publishing. Its publications are Exhibit Magazine and BBC TopGear India Magazine, and its headquarters are in Mumbai, Maharashtra.

Ramesh Somani's triple role — founder, chief editor and publisher — gives the magazine an unusually personal editorial identity for a glossy title. He conducts many of its best-known interviews himself, including its podcast conversations, and appears as the public face of its events and awards juries. For advertisers and technology brands, that continuity is part of the package: the man who founded the magazine in 2005 still fronts it.

Language and Readership

Exhibit is published in English, as its subscription listings confirm, and it is aimed at affluent, urban, technology-buying readers: the professional choosing a flagship phone or a laptop, the car buyer comparing premium models, the young reader who follows gadgets, gaming and fashion together. Its cover lines — explainers on artificial intelligence tools, guides to using new chatbots, histories of classic phones, previews of the Paris Olympics athletes or of the Consumer Electronics Show — are written for the curious generalist rather than the engineer.

The readership is also a social-media audience. The magazine's cover shoots and interviews are made to be shared, its personalities are drawn heavily from film, sport and the creator economy, and its events business assumes readers who follow influencers as closely as they follow product launches.

Editorial Content and Sections

A monthly issue of Exhibit typically mixes several strands. There are hands-on reviews — recent issues have tested laptops, foldable phones, earbuds, smartwatches and speakers from brands such as Dell, Lenovo, Vivo, Sony, Samsung, Google, Lava and Poco. There are explainers that translate technology for lay readers, features on companies and industries — how big a retailer or a technology giant really is, what went wrong at a fallen ed-tech star — and interviews and cover features with film and public personalities, such as its February 2025 cover conversation with Akshay Kumar.

Lifestyle content runs in parallel: fashion explained, travel lists such as twenty-five places to explore in a new year, gaming previews, monsoon gear guides and festival-of-technology coverage from events like CES. The Year End Special for 2024 carried the Exhibit Tech Awards, facts about NVIDIA, a profile of javelin champion Neeraj Chopra and a guide to free AI tools — a table of contents that captures the magazine's blend in a single issue: silicon, sport, celebrity and shopping.

Print and Digital Editions

Exhibit remains a print monthly as well as a digital brand. Single issues are sold through the Exhibit Store at cover prices in the range of one hundred and fifty to two hundred rupees, with print and digital options, delivery promised within days, and subscription offers — its February 2025 edition, for example, was promoted with gifts for early three-year print subscribers. Print survival is itself a statement in Indian consumer magazines, most of which have shrunk or gone digital-only; Exhibit continues to invest in the physical object, its cover shoots and its newsstand presence.

Digitally, the brand lives at exhibit.tech, on social platforms under the Exhibit Magazine name, on video, and in audio through The Exhibit Magazine Podcast, whose episodes are long conversations — with actors such as Vaani Kapoor and Dulquer Salmaan among the guests — interviewed by Ramesh Somani. The group's own description stresses that it has kept a high standard across all its platforms over the magazine's run.

Events, Awards and Properties

Exhibit's events are a substantial part of what the magazine is. The Tech Fashion Tour, organised by Exhibit Technologies, stages technology and fashion together — gadgets displayed alongside designer collections — and by its eighth season in 2025 it was a fixture of the magazine's calendar, covered as a cover story in the February 2025 issue. The Top 100 Digital Influencers initiative, launched in 2018, shortlisted over a thousand profiles, opened a top two hundred to public voting, and honoured creators across technology, automobiles, fashion, beauty, food, travel, lifestyle and entertainment at a Mumbai ceremony attended by many of India's best-known creators.

The group has also run the Exhibit Awards for creators — the 2024 edition named winners in categories from travel and tech content creation to gaming and dance — and the Exhibit Auto Tech Awards, whose premiere edition's jury included actor-producer Abhay Deol, VU Technologies founder Devita Saraf, veteran journalist Ranojoy Mukherjee and Ramesh Somani, across car and bike categories from hatchbacks to superbikes. These properties convert the magazine's editorial authority into live franchises, and its influencer-marketing business grew naturally out of them.

Notable Editors and Contributors

Ramesh Somani dominates the magazine's public identity: founder, chief editor, publisher, interviewer and awards juror. Around him, the group's editorial leadership has included specialists such as Prithvi Radhakrishna, named as editor for tech and auto at Exhibit Magazine and thewheelz.com on the Auto Tech Awards jury. The magazine's contributors and cover subjects are themselves a draw — film stars photographed with featured gadgets by leading photographers, technology founders interviewed about their companies, and athletes such as Neeraj Chopra profiled in special issues.

That contributor model — part journalism, part stage management of personalities — is characteristic of the Indian glossy sector, and Exhibit has practised it consistently: a cover is an event, credited like a film, with stylists, photographers and brand partners named alongside the editor.

Exhibit and BBC TopGear India

Since 2020 the magazine has shared a house with BBC TopGear India, acquired by Exhibit Group for the Indian territory that year. The pairing is logical: Exhibit already covered automobiles within its lifestyle mix, and TopGear brought the world's most famous motoring magazine brand, with its own Indian editorial operation, into the same Mumbai office. The two titles are managed as sister publications, and their combined team presents itself as a single Exhibit and TopGear operation across print, digital and events.

For Exhibit itself, the TopGear connection deepened its automobile coverage and its claim to span the full territory where technology meets lifestyle — the phone in the reader's pocket and the car in the reader's driveway, written about by the same group.

Recent Developments

The magazine has continued monthly publication through 2024 and 2025, with issues built around the Tech Fashion Tour's eighth season, the best of CES 2025, anticipated video games and year-end technology awards, and its store continues to sell current print and digital editions. Its podcast, creator awards and influencer properties remain active arms of the brand. Two decades after its 2005 founding, Exhibit stands as one of the longer-lived survivors of India's consumer technology magazine era — a print monthly that adapted by becoming an events, video and influencer business with a magazine at its centre.