The young of mainstream India are too embattled to dream big

Our study started with no such preconceived meanings. It performed an emic or insider’s deep dive into the contours of aspiration for the world of mass or mainstream young India, a world described in our previous column in Mint (‘Young India is fuelled by agency but is being failed by structure,’ 24 March) as one of exhausting entropy where agency comes up against the paucity of structures. In this piece, we focus on how to understand and read their aspirations and accompanying anxieties.

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Our most telling finding was that for so many of our respondents, the aspiration was a government job, a coveted position of stability and security. This holy grail, we thought, had disappeared a few generations prior. However, it showed up with telling regularity, its contours apparently having been mulled over in their minds for a long time. “I want a Central government and not a state job," was also often a clear preference.

Their many efforts towards this long-term hope ran parallel to their acts in the here and now, trying to willy-nilly pass qualifying exams, often in multiple attempts. Many respondents found themselves chasing this goal for years; responses such as “Dream job is UPSC [short for Union Public Service Commission] and all the rest I have not thought about," testify to the stickiness and stuck-ness of this aspiration.

The reasons for this specific goal were mainly related to personal well-being—security, low pressures, predictability, high status and recognition. It was also often a last-ditch option, since their educational degrees didn’t allow them to access jobs related to their degree. “Not much scope after B.Tech, so I chose civil services", was a typical response. “Nine-to-five peace, and no stress," was another.

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Abetting this quest is the sense that entrance exams for government jobs are difficult but within reach, and can be cracked through individual perseverance and hard work. Although aware of evidence to the contrary, they read it as a problem of “not enough" government jobs.

Another dimension of this aspiration is found from responses such as “I just need a stable future and I don’t want to live a hopeless nightmare," suggesting that an obsessive focus on some picture of a future secure life helps them in the present too. It seems to provide an anchor of great hope in their world of hustling for the here and now, that we described in our first column. Perhaps that is why they refuse to articulate any fear that such a future may never come.

The language of difficulty and stress did find a way into their responses, not in relation to this aspiration being unachievable, but as regards their mental and physical health. For a cohort of people not yet 30, an alarmingly large number reported fatigue, sleep issues, vitamin deficiencies, anxiety and mental health concerns, difficult menstrual health and debilitating hormonal fluctuations.

Even when speaking about their health, though, their language took on the tone of their body being a project they needed to master—“must exercise", “I try and stay healthy", “I need to do more."

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Read together, these responses suggest two things; one, that all agency is deployed in pursuit of the good—read ‘stable’—life. Two, all stress is sublimated and not confronted, except as individual malady. If this were a Netflix series, the blurb would read thus: ‘Striving endlessly, and going nowhere, a stressed bunch of young people enrols in the coaching factory for a government job.’

To be clear, we do not judge the aspiration for a government job. However, when it is so greatly desired merely for the stability and security it provides, our reading is that the sapping of young energies to get by in the here-and-now world is producing in them a voluntarily stunting of their aspirations for their own lives. They are eschewing the full depth and breadth of possibilities that new India offers for them to aspire to, replacing it with the self-inflicted myopia of bonsai dreams and perfectly stable lives.

Are they untouched by these broader possibilities to aspire for? They do talk about having a work life that abets their well-being, fosters their sense of enterprise and excitement, and recognizes them as valid beings in the world. They chat about possible startups with friends, hope for a world in which their hobbies might become their work, and express desires to do good in the world.

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A clear thread through these dreamscapes was the search for meaning as well as community. In these conversations, they displayed a palpable sense of joy, whilst providing the caveat that none of these goals of theirs seemed to ever be able to materialize. “I mean we have a million ideas, but we never initiate any" was the general tone.

It is, therefore, even more tragic, given the evidence of such joy, that the only aspiration they seem to allow themselves is to find a job where they might be able to finally rest after running on an endless treadmill in the here and now. This generation is tired and finding themselves stuck in a waiting room—from which to leave, they need to keep moving.

Why are they not angry and resentful? What makes them keep trying? We will explore this in our final column.

Commissioned by Bijapurkar, the study was conceptualized and led by Krishnamurthy, with assistance from an Auxohub fieldwork team.

The authors are, respectively, associate professor of anthropology at IIT Madras, and a business advisor.

This is the second part of a three-part series. Read the first part here and the third part here.