The brutal killing of Chongtham Vikram Singh, a musician from Manipur, in Delhi has once again brought attention to the prejudice people from Northeast India continue to face.

Human rights activist Binalakshmi Nepram, speaking about the killing, raised a question that bothered me. Her point was: If the people, cultures and history of Northeast India hardly find a place in our textbooks, how will children grow up knowing and understanding the Northeast as an integral part of India?

It is an important question. But it made me wonder: why only textbooks?

If someone asked me to name five popular Hindi films with actors from the Northeast, five well-known television characters, or even a few mainstream advertisements featuring people from the Northeast, I am sure I would be tongue-tied.

If I do a little Googling, I may recollect Danny Denzongpa, Adil Hussain, Andrea Tariang in Pink, Chum Darang in Badhaai Do and Andrea Kevichüsa in Anek. There have also been occasional films such as Axone, which looked specifically at the lives of Northeastern people in metropolitan India. But come to think of it, the list is not very long.

And that itself says something.

We learn about the people of India not just from textbooks. We learn from the people we see around us, in films, television, advertising, sports and popular culture.

What we see repeatedly becomes familiar. And, over time, that familiarity shapes our idea of who we see as Indian.

Yet, the Northeast is still surprisingly invisible in much of our popular culture. Even when the region appears in mainstream cinema, it is often because the story itself is about the Northeast: insurgency, conflict, ethnicity, discrimination, or its distinctive culture and landscape.

But why should a Northeastern face need a reason to be there?

Why can't the young woman buying a car in an advertisement be from Manipur? Why can't the couple discussing a home loan be Naga? Why can't a doctor in a television serial be from Mizoram? Or a group of college friends naturally include someone from Meghalaya?

No explanation. No traditional costume to establish identity. No story about discrimination. Just people going about their everyday lives around us.

This is also where the idea of othering becomes important. Othering does not always happen through overt prejudice or exclusion.

Sometimes, it happens through absence: through the repeated suggestion that some people are not part of the ordinary, everyday picture of India.

We have been talking a lot about inclusivity in communication. We look at gender, caste, religion and disability. But do we ever look at geography?

Advertising has a particularly important role here because it enters our homes every day. Casting directors and advertising agencies constantly decide what an Indian family looks like, what an Indian professional looks like, and what young India looks like. How often does that India look Northeastern?

People from the Northeast are still routinely mistaken for Chinese. And when China itself is often projected as an adversary, what does that association do to the way a young Northeastern man or woman is perceived on our streets?

This is why visibility matters. A geography textbook can tell a child that Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland or Arunachal Pradesh is part of India. But popular culture can do something a textbook cannot. It can make the people who live there part of our everyday idea of who an Indian is.

Perhaps inclusion is not only about giving everyone a voice. It is also about making sure everyone is seen.

The next time we talk about diversity in communication, maybe there is one more question we should ask: Does the India we show actually look like India? Or are we, through what we leave out, continuing to other our own?

The author is the former director of Population First and currently a trustee on its board.