600m young India’s are changing your world
Over 600m Indians, more than half the country’s population are under 25, a generation that is simultaneously more connected and global than any that has come before it and it is an important contribution to understanding the 21st century’s other emerging superpower.
Dreamers bring to life their boundless ambition and extraordinary imagination to create opportunities in the unlikeliest of spaces. These dreamers are the face of new India. Angry, frustrated with being marginalised by both globalisation and India’s old politics, they place hope on Modi’s government’s exclusionary nationalism and above all in their personal truths shape your own future, exploit or be exploited. All the aspiring Bollywood stars, the click bait gurus, the cow protection army hoodlums, Allahabad University’s first female student president all united in the belief that they were born for bigger and better things. India is country that is increasingly characterised by ambition and crushing limitations and for the wealth-chasers, hucksters and fame-hunters, this is a generation that cannot and will note be defined on anything but their own terms.
Snigdha Poonam’s cultural study of the unlikeliest of fortune-hunters travels though the small towns of northern India to gauge the phenomenon that India’s generation Y, as she travels on carts and trucks through the notorious Badlands to reveal a theatre of toxic masculinity, spirited ambition and a kind of hunger for change that is bound to drive the future of our country. These young Indians aren’t just changing their world but they are changing yours.
Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing The World by Singdha Poonam, Harvard University Press £12.95/$17.95.