Rage Against the Machine

Rage rooms are gradually becoming popular spaces for recreational therapy or self-therapy but is smashing, crashing or breaking things actually helping people de-stress?

- Divya Tiwari

A glass bottle arcs through the air and meets a hammer mid-flight. It shatters on impact, shards spraying across and inside the room.

Notes from a Taylor Swift track playing outside filters into the cacophonic room, where metal clangs with metal and sometimes ceramic cups and empty beer bottles crash over and over again... until there’s silence.

A few minutes earlier, Farheen* had been sitting outside, staring at a waiver form. Sign here, it said. She complied. A 24-year-old consultant, she needed an outlet to vent her rage. “A socially acceptable” one, she clarified. She wanted a place where she could let loose, swing a hammer and break things. All in a “controlled environment”, so that “nobody gets hurt.”

On recommendation from her therapist, she arrived at an establishment that promised just that. “I am not putting on any music and I hope you hear my rage and figure out how frustrated one can be,” she said, just before she walked through the door leading to the ‘Rage Room.’

After 10 minutes of angry metal clanging against the table, walls and sounds of splintering ceramic and glass, she emerged, looking victorious, still, calm and in quiet contemplation. “Now I have to go and attend that meeting at work.” Asked if the cathartic exercise helped, she said she wasn’t too sure, but added that it felt better in the moment.

In the Rage Room, one can experience and engage in a socially palatable form of venting anger for a price.

Dhruv, 21, a student, content creator and businessman, and his partner, Khushi, found the Rage Room on Instagram. Delhi natives, they came to create content, bond and “break things to hopefully feel better about their stresses.”

“Our generation overthinks a lot, about life, career, relationships. This place sounds like a great place to drown those noises and engage in destruction since killing another person is not an option,” Dhruv says.