India's lost generation

It was British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Before departing for the snowy slopes of Davos, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who’s faced serious flak for the government’s failure in tackling the mammoth unemployment crisis, dismissed it as “lies”. He said that seven million jobs were created in the formal sector in the past year. His claim, based on the data from the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation, was immediately contested by analysts as selective cherry-picking. And some days later an International Labour Organisation report announced that “the number of jobless in India will increase to 18.6 million in 2018 and 18.9 million in 2019, against 18.3 million in 2017”; it also added that 0.5 million more were unemployed in 2017 than what earlier estimates showed.

The number-crunchers can fight it out. But those looking for a qualitative account of these job-seeking, desperate millennials — uneducated, unemployed, or unemployable — that form India’s vast “youth bulge”, many of the answers are in a remarkable piece of work of reportage out next month.

Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World (Penguin; Rs 599) by New Delhi-based journalist Snigdha Poonam is not, as the title may imply, about the “creamy layer” of the youth who populate English-speaking elite colleges, engineering institutes, and business schools, but about the rest, the chancers who don’t stand much of a chance. For nearly four years, Ms Poonam trekked to the villages and small towns of the Hindi heartland to track some of their stories. Occasionally exhilarating but often disturbing, it is a deeply unsettling account of “a generation … of wealth-chasers, attention-seekers, power-trappers and fame-hunters”. Mostly male, aggressive, with inchoate notions of nation and nationalism, they are the likely bedrock of Mr Modi’s majoritarian politics. Their chief form of communication is Facebook and WhatsApp; and the main desire to reinvent their self-image to somehow escape the perilous provincialism that imprisons their lives.

Take the Singhal brothers from a village in Haryana, who set up WittyFeed, a click-bait website in Indore that uploads anything that will go “viral” — with 82 million monthly visits, 1.5 billion page views, and 4.2 million likes of FB, it is set to rival BuzzFeed, the world leader in viral content. The Singhals’ tightly-controlled Internet cocoon is a heady mix of moralising and Steve Jobs spiel. (“Bhaiyya becomes very angry if anyone criticises India,” says a Singhal employee while Mr Singhal himself issues a barrage of homilies such as “Live your life as if you were to die tomorrow”.)

The world of WittyFeed is a far cry from the life of Moin Khan, an impoverished balloon seller in Ranchi, who saved money by milking cows to enrol in English-speaking classes in one of the thousands of coaching centres in small-town India, and in 10 years was heading the American Academy of Spoken English. “There is a craze for me everywhere … People in [my village] … come home to hear me say something in English.”

Ms Poonam’s narrative bristles with small-time fixers like Pankaj Prasad, who finds power and wealth by filling Aadhaar forms for poor villagers, or big time scammers who lure gullible job-seekers with offers from call centres; it chronicles stories of abject failure, such as “Mr Jharkhand’s” search for stardom; and seething frustration, among rod-wielding misogynists fighting “love jihad”, and maddened upper-caste gau rakshaks.

Not many women feature in this “theatre of toxic masculinity”. One exception is Richa Singh’s bitter struggle to become the first students’ union president of Allahabad University.

I asked Ms Poonam (who is 34, attractive, the daughter of a retired IAS officer in Jharkhand, and followed her father’s advice to exchange their upper-caste family name for her mother’s given name) what it was like to follow the lives of so many strange, shady, often deeply unpleasant males. “A revelation,” she said. “Many of them had never had an interaction with a female outside their homes. They were often more nervous than me.” When she finally married her long-standing boyfriend, Business Standard columnist Mihir S Sharma, last year, she confesses he was “horrified”. “Who are these people?” he would ask her. “All these losers you keep chasing.”

Winners or losers, what is the single-biggest transition she noted among India’s lost generation? “The Smartphone,” she said. “It has given them a new identity, often transcending markers of caste, class, religion, and place.” And what was the one thing that was unchanged? “Corruption in all forms, fraud, cheating, forgery. These are not considered crimes, rather they are par for the course, one way of getting ahead.”

Unsurprisingly, her book has been showered with plaudits by leading critics and opinion-makers. It’s been quickly snapped up by a British publisher and the well-known agent David Godwin is sold on it. It was recently launched in London and gets star billing at the Jaipur Literature Festival. 

What did she feel at the end of her journey among the Indian unemployed? “Very worried and anxious,” she said.