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Did you know that Parsis in Mumbai, instead of being left at the Tower of Silence after
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they die, are now cremated?
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Because a cow fell sick in the early 1990s?
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Did you know that the smog in Delhi is caused by something that farmers in Punjab do, and
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that there's no way to stop them?
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Did you know that there wasn't one gas tragedy in Bhopal, but three?
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One of them was seen, but two were unseen.
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Did you know that many well-intentioned government policies hurt the people they're supposed
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Why was demonetization a bad idea?
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How should GST have been implemented?
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Why are all our politicians so corrupt when not all of them are bad people?
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I'm Amit Verma, and in my weekly podcast, The Seen and the Unseen, I take a shot at
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answering all these questions and many more.
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I aim to go beyond the seen and show you the unseen effects of public policy and private
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I speak to experts on economics, political philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and constitutional
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law so that their insights can blow not only my mind, but also yours.
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The Seen and the Unseen releases every Monday.
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So do check out the archives and follow the show at seenunseen.in.
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You can also subscribe to The Seen and the Unseen on whatever podcast app you happen
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And now let's move on to the show.
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Everyone speaks of India's great demographic dividend.
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The average age in India is 27.
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60% of this country was born after 1991, the year in which we allegedly liberalized some
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Our young people should be our greatest asset.
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And yet, our young people need jobs and education, and these are just not there.
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Every month, one million people enter the workforce, and there just aren't enough jobs
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All of these young people entering the best years of their lives with hope and desire,
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but without opportunities, what are they to do?
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How do they feel about this?
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Can they be anything but angry?
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How do they cope with their anger?
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Will this so-called demographic dividend end up being a demographic disaster?
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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As a middle-aged man of great privilege living in a big city, I sometimes feel I don't understand
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what India is all about.
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The life I live as a member of the elite is very different from the lives lived by most
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And I wonder sometimes in my little cocoon whether I understand this country at all.
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So much about it is so bewildering.
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Well, my guest on today's episode is someone who has helped clear some of the fog from
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Snigdha Poonam is a Delhi-based journalist, and her book, Dreamers, chronicles the lives
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of a handful of young Indians and gives a sense of how young people across small towns
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in North India feel about the world.
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Reading the book was an interesting experience to me.
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The characters and the way they thought about the world seemed very familiar to me.
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But at the same time, the world they inhabited and the way they chose to behave in that world
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Snigdha's book gave me an acute sense of the many parallel universes that exist within
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this one nation of ours.
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And I'm delighted that she's agreed to join me in the studio today to talk about her experience
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of writing this book and the insights she gained from it.
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But before we get to our conversation, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Snigdha, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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So, tell me a little bit about how you decided to write this book to begin with.
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How did the idea of the book come to you?
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Started on a dating website.
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Back in the day, I think, 2009, an American dating website has just entered the Indian
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You know, I mean, this was the time everyone was talking about like India's hundreds of
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millions of people joining the middle class.
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So it was just natural that something of that kind would, you know, would tap into that
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So this website comes to India and suddenly everyone's on it.
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And I read a couple of pieces just announcing its arrival and its popularity and I signed
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up for a long form piece for the Caravan magazine where I was working then.
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I signed up and I made a very basic profile, which is just, you know, age, location, hobbies,
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Put a very basic photo of myself and just like let it out.
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And I wake up the next morning and I have hundreds of messages from young men, like,
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you know, from 18 to I would say 32, that wasn't so surprising to me.
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I expected some of that.
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I mean, not so many, but I expected some of that.
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But what surprised me that not all of these messages were, you know, these like young
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men declaring love or wanting to have sex with me or saying hi baby or the sort of stuff
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that that usually comes in.
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A lot of these people, and I started responding to some of them, wanted to just talk to me
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about about their lives because no one was talking to them.
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I was talking to them and they were in the smallest of, you know, places in the most
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obscure corners in India, places that I'd never heard of, like villages in Andhra Pradesh
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and the Northeast and Tamil Nadu and of course, UP and Bihar and the usual.
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And some of them were telling me the same things, which is that, which is like a deep
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feeling of frustration with where their lives were and with whatever prospects that, you
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know, stretched out in front of them.
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If they were in college, they didn't know if they were going to get jobs.
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If they were already working, they weren't satisfied with their income.
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If they lived with their family, they didn't know if they were fitting in, if their parents
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Most of them wanted to get out and make something of their lives, but didn't know how.
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And I mean, sure, there was a lot of anxiety about love and sex and romance.
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And I did write about that too, but this stayed with me.
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And I started thinking about that more deeply and, but I just remained on the website and
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let these messages come.
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And then shortly after that, I wrote another story that took me back into the same world.
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This was something for the New York Times and I, I used to keep getting these like messages
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I'm sure everyone did and still does about this personality development classes.
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This was at least a huge rage in Delhi.
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So every day I would wake up and I had these messages saying, you can develop your personality
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for 2,500 rupees a month.
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Come to this like London school of English in Patparganj or, or somewhere or the other.
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And so one day I just decided to show up because I was like, what is this personality and you
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know, who needs a personality and what way is it being developed?
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So I show up at a, one of these like London school of English classes in Arjori garden.
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And again, it is crowded with like the same kind of people who were speaking to me from
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across India on the dating website.
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These were some very young men.
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I'm talking 17, 18, they had come to Delhi from small towns and villages and because
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this was Delhi, Rajasthan and Haryana and UP and they were all either just out of college
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or had dropped out and were all looking for opportunities in Delhi and just didn't know
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how to be in a big city, how to, how to, you know, talk to people, how to face an interview,
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how to approach a girl, that sort of thing, you know, how to order things at a restaurant
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or, or talk to someone in a bus.
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So that this was like, they were looking for to develop a more global personality and,
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I mean, this, they, you know, the, it was basically a class in spoken English.
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So it begins with an introduction.
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What do you want to do with your hobbies?
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And, and then like, you know, goes like pretty deep, pretty quickly.
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And I, and I got to that later in the spoken English chapter for the book.
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So, you know, some of these things, themes were coming up and I had done three or four
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of these stories when a penguin random house got in touch with me and said that they had
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I wanted to go back to my own small town, Ranchi, and just be there for a while, at
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least, at least a year, start talking to people, choose some of them and see what they want
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And if, you know, in the time that I'm following them, if they'll get any, like anywhere close
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to those, those dreams and desires.
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And like, what kind of preconceived notions did you go in with, which sort of turned out
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to not be the case when you went?
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And what did you really learn through this process?
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How different is your eventual book from what you thought it would be?
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What did you think you would find, which you did not?
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I mean, honestly, I didn't know anything, which is hard for people to realize.
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But I grew up in a cocoon of cocoons in small towns in North India because my father was
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a senior bureaucrat and we always had a whole like system of like, you know, walls and boundaries
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And I think that as a girl who's growing up in an upper middle class family, in a bureaucratic
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setup, most avoid are like just young men on the loose.
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And I just avoided them growing up.
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And so I didn't know what like, you know, young men in North Indian villages and small
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towns actually think and feel.
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So it was first of all, a challenge for me to like go back and engage with that group
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of people that had done my best to avoid growing up.
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So I didn't have that many notions.
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I mean, I read the usual stuff that we all do.
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I knew that there was like a great wave of aspiration because that kept coming up that
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people want big, shiny, fancy things and that, you know, small towns were like changing and
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there was suddenly like gyms and spas and hotels and restaurants.
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And beyond that, I don't think that my understanding was at all extensive.
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And there's a very interesting sentence in your first chapter where you write a couple
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of evocative paragraphs about your growing up as a small town girl.
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And there you say at one point that quote, I was fortunate to become a thinking adult
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before post truth unquote.
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So it's not just as if when you were in these small towns, you had kind of stayed in your
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cocoon and now you went back and went beyond that.
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But also the times had changed fundamentally that the young men who grew up at the same
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time as you would not be the same as these young men you were now speaking to who were
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growing up in an India where sort of there were so many more young people, there were
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so many more globalized influences.
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Yes, they had so much more information and opinion.
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And yes, I didn't expect that either.
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And I was very sort of struck by like a couple of the insights that come through your book
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is that everybody feels so incredibly entitled.
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And you said the further you go away from the cities, the bigger these young people
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So there is a sense of entitlement that I want to be great in the case of one of your
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He wants to not just be prime minister, but eventually rule Mars.
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And along with this entitlement, there's also a lot of anger because those things aren't
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And at one level, it seems to me that these are sort of ingrained emotions.
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Young people everywhere tend to be like, I remember I was very entitled and angry when
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But at the same time, there seems to be a sense in your book that there is something
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different about the sense of entitlement that these guys feel, especially for example, in
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the insight that the more you go towards small towns, the more you will find this.
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I mean, I remember being a very ambitious young woman myself.
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But I think that what has changed is that, you know, no matter where they are, like what
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they're facing, what they're looking at, you know, the message that comes to them constantly
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is that anything is possible.
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You know, from, I was listening to some of the Narendra Modi speeches from 2014, he actually
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speaks to them like a motivational speaker would.
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He speaks about dreams.
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He says that their potential is being wasted, you know, that all of these like years of
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opportunities have just like gone by and that, you know, that you dream and we will make
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it possible sort of thing.
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You know, you'll be listening to ads, you can be on the internet.
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I mean, so I think that it is very hard for a 19 year old in a village in Jharkhand to
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be totally disconnected and not internalize any of these like several messages that filter
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down to him on a daily basis.
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And you know, one of the backdrop of all this, a backdrop of what is happening in young India
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today, so to say, and the backdrop of your whole book is what you call India's 3E problem,
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which is that people are uneducated, unemployed and unemployable.
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And obviously the first and the third, uneducated and unemployable are part of the same thing.
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And even many educated people are unemployable because of the state of our education system.
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And your book really sort of divides the responses to this into these three sections where your
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first section is about how some people try to mitigate this and find opportunity in different
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The second section is about the enormous amount of anger out there and how that finds expression.
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And the third section of your book is about, and which I want to ask you about in detail
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later about how we have this mentality that the only way to get ahead is by scamming other
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Let's kind of talk section by section.
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In the first chapter of your book, it was, it's called the click baiter.
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And it's about this fascinating chap called Vinay Singhal and this company that he built
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called Witty Feed, which is, you know, you mentioned was number two in the world after
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BuzzFeed in terms of viral content.
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And it's almost this confluence of circumstances, which like a perfect storm, which created
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Number one, he was a man with big dreams and like you mentioned before, quote, it almost
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seemed as if the further you live from a big city, the bigger your dreams, unquote.
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Second, he chose to go to indoor and set up this company.
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And again, you say in your book, quote, the city was big enough to be full of young job
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aspirants and small enough to present them with few options, unquote, and therefore fertile
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ground for him to find people to work with him.
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And it's very interesting how he hired all these young people with the condition that
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this would be absolutely the first job and they were expected to immerse themselves in
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cultures which they knew nothing about and create content, which would be compelling
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Like you describe a girl who's never dated in her life, who's 18 years old, who's creating
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content about what to do if you're jilted or so on and so forth.
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And there's another really nice sentence in the book about this where you say, quote, a
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week at the company is all it takes them to go from not knowing anything about the world
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to deciding what the world should know, full stop.
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And you've actually seen these people, they all live in a couple of bungalows together
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And it's like a family, like you mentioned, the way they work.
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And I found this whole ecosystem very fascinating.
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And also, how the hell could they succeed because they literally didn't know anything
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about the people they were writing for.
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I mean, I guess I said at some point in the chapter that this was like the first time
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I had met a set of people who lived in the internet.
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So everything that they know about the world is from the internet.
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As the man himself, Venus Engel, told me in one of his thoughtful monologues, he said
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that the internet is the most powerful tool that the man has ever invented.
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And I was blown away by it because there have been other tools.
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But you take an 18-year-old and she's writing an article about how to build a swimming pool
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But I really wonder if that comes from her own experiences because she talks to me about
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her family and where she lives in one rented room in Indore with her mother and sister
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who've come from Gwalior to join her because of that passed away and they would have left
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And she figured out about this company and she applied for a job.
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And so now she has to give Americans all sorts of life hacks for all sorts of problems when
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she does not know a thing about America or Americans or American suburban life and its
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But she learns everything on the internet.
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And so she writes an article about how to build a swimming pool in your own house and
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at least 1.5 million people would have read it.
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I think I'd click on anything which offered to show me how to build a swimming pool in
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my own apartment in Bombay.
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No, I did click on, have you been brushing your teeth wrong all your life?
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Okay, I don't want to go and look for that story.
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And what kind of struck me what you mentioned about living in the internet is that as much
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as they were living in India, they were also living in Americana in a sense and in a sense
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is almost wrong to say that she would not know what it is like to have a swimming pool
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in her own house because yes, that is true in India, but in her virtual life on the internet,
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she's kind of been through that.
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Yeah, I mean, you wake up and literally the first thing you have to think of on your own,
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I mean, to the help of the internet is how to get lips like Kylie Jenner.
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And at least I knew who Kylie Jenner was, but several people don't.
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And that was amazing to me.
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And the thing is that what I want people to know is that this is not just these 80 kids
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I've met so many people like that when I was not reporting on Witty Feed, I was hanging
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out with an Instagram, with a friend of mine who is an Instagram friend of mine from Indore.
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She was 18, she was in college and we became friends because she was fashion blogging on
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Instagram and I was interested in very young fashion bloggers in small towns who were actually
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So I spent a couple of days in her hostel room in Indore.
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She's from Bhopal and she was in college in Indore and I met her at a very interesting
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She's just met someone that she liked on Instagram who happened to live in the same city.
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And she was going on the very first date of her life with this man.
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And I happened to be there in her hostel room at this moment.
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And this is the most important moment in her life because she's trying to decide what she
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must wear for her first date with this man that she likes a lot.
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And she had only three options and that I can't remember the third, but they were something
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that Katy Perry had worn the previous day or Selena Gomez had worn on her first date.
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And so she chose Selena Gomez's outfit.
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So you get small town knockoffs of this which people buy.
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And it was actually a nice white shirt, such as the one I'm wearing because obviously this
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is a, it's always a great outfit, but that was most surprising.
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But then the more time I spent with 18 year olds in places like that, I realized that it's
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actually pretty usual for them.
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They may not have to think of Deepika Padukone at all because they have the options.
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They can go straight to Kim Kardashian.
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So your second chapter is about another fascinating character called Mohen Khan who teaches English.
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And again, he is someone who is not even from a family where English is spoken, rather he
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serves those families in various ways.
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And he overcomes the class difference, takes an English class because he views it as a
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ticket to another world.
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It's an aspirational thing and in a sense, even a ticket to perhaps this cultural world
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of Americana and the internet and so on.
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And he learns that and at the end of his first course, he's immediately made the teacher
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and he sort of starts teaching English.
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And I found that chapter very fascinating.
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I mean, there's one paragraph which is really interesting and I'll just again take the liberty
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of quoting that in its full.
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After you speak about the whole ecosystem of language classes, you write code, the version
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of English they speak with colleagues, waiters, customer care executives will define the future
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of the language in this country and in fact, the future of English worldwide.
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With India expected to have the largest number of English speakers in the world in the next
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10 years, overtaking the US, the English they speak will be the English of the future.
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And the English they speak is in a sense, a very functional sort of English where you're
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kind of getting by and it's also, it has signaling value, it has functional value and that's
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And that's a big, how big was English in small town India where you did your stories?
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I think this was the most richest of all the worlds that I tried to describe in the book
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through the various characters.
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And I think that I was able to capture because of the limits of word, length etc. only a
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part of this because English was huge, everyone wanted to learn it, everyone had a very distinct
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There was a large amount of like politics being played over it, especially in the Hindi
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belt and it just seemed like, like even in the lives of everyone else that I cover, English
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played a part, you know, how they saw it, the relationship with it, if they were using
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it, if they were not using it.
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And so I think that it was, it was really big.
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Was your speaking English something that put you in a pedestal in the eyes of these guys?
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Like would they have given you the same access if say you were a Hindi journalist for a Hindi
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I sat in this spoken English class for at least on and off for at least three months
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and I wasn't allowed to say a sentence, like a word, forget a sentence because I would
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have given myself away and then like, like everyone else around me would have felt uncomfortable.
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So yes, it was in some sense, it did stop me from interviewing those kids because Mohin
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Khan asked me not to speak, but yes, I mean, especially with him, I think he felt really
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connected to me because I was, he really values a really small set of people with whom he
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can speak English in a, in a fluent way, unlike with the students and I was one of them.
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So we remain in touch and he, you know, he, I think most of our conversations happened
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in a mix of Hindi and English, but he kept bringing up how much he, he valued the fact
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that I was, I was there with him to like practice his fluent English.
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And just tangentially moving away from a bit, from the book itself to your experience of
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writing it that, you know, at first when you approach these people and you started interacting
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with them, they must have had sort of performative cells in front of you where they're either
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trying to impress you or whatever.
#
And then gradually they get comfortable and they let their guard down and they just themselves.
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And how was this process and how, how was your awareness of it influencing what went
#
In some sense, because these were young men and I, in some cases I wasn't that much older
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to them, there was, some of them kept trying to impress me in one way or the other throughout.
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So I don't think that that stopped being the case in some of the, in some cases, especially
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with the Mr. Jharkhand turned aspiring Bollywood superstar.
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He was just from the first time I met him, he just, he was vulnerable and honest and
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he decided to like, you know, just tell me everything, whether it was embarrassing or
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it was silly or, you know, it made him look bad.
#
So there were some people like that and, and especially in the case of the BJP member,
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the BJP, he was the most difficult for me to crack because he wanted to present an image
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and so no matter what I'd said, he would just try to like sound aggressive or tell me stories
#
of great swagger and importance.
#
And so I think that was one of the hardest stories for me to report because it took so
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many like meetings over so many months for me to like have a real conversation with him.
#
Could that be because like maybe the Mr. Jharkhand guy, because of the class difference, he just
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already put you on a pedestal and you're not someone he's, you know, who is not from the
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same society as him almost.
#
And therefore he felt comfortable in opening up to you.
#
But the guy who worked in the BJP was much closer to being from a similar sort of background
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is in fact, your background was pretty similar to him.
#
And no, I think it was not just class, but also worldviews and ideologies because when
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I meet for the same chapter, when I meet a 19 year old member of Bajrang Dal and made
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it, he, he comes from very different social background as well, but he's very hostile
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to me and you know, I have to do a lot of convincing for this guy to talk to me and
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still to remain suspicious.
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This is the love Jihad guy.
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But I suppose his class was always there.
#
Like in the case of the Mr. Jharkhand, he had never spoken to a woman before and even
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the participants, even the female participants in the Ram shows that he had begun to do wouldn't
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talk to him because he didn't speak good enough English for them.
#
So he, he did feel left out a lot.
#
And I think we came to a point where I was meeting him so often that it seemed to him
#
that we were dating, which was really odd because, you know, I would buy him coffee
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and I would ask him questions and he would answer and I was taking notes for most of
#
the time, but, but he had never like been with a woman in that way.
#
So I'm also I'm guessing he had no exposure to journalism of the sort that you were doing
#
No, I, I actually saw there's one thing that I decided to do pretty early on, which is
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to explain to them at great length what I was doing.
#
So I kept bringing up the fact that this book was now, you know, one third done or one fourth
#
done and that I was doing meeting these other people.
#
And I spoke to them about the importance of their stories and what they meant in a way
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that was accessible to them.
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But still, as you said, I mean, they couldn't have understood fully what I was trying to
#
And at some point he asked me if I was his girlfriend and broke my heart, but I had to
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tell him that I wasn't and he mustn't think that and we must keep meeting, but this was
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like, so the thing is, I wanted to be their friend.
#
I was not, it was never completely an interview with any of these people because I spoke about
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They spoke to me about themselves.
#
It was more conversation, but at the same time, I think that it, for some time he remained
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hurt and then we got back to the routine.
#
And there's that classic journalist dilemma there that when you do a story on someone,
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at some level you're using them as instrumental to your purposes.
#
And at the other level, you also want to relate to them as human beings and friends.
#
And was this something you thought about or something that was difficult?
#
I did constantly because there was this power imbalance and there was, there were so many
#
additional tensions because of this like male, female thing, especially because I was the
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only woman in their lives and in this way, outside of their families with whom they were
#
meeting, they were having coffee with, there were sometimes I traveled with them.
#
Sometimes I followed them across cities and obviously it made them wonder why I was so
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I was so interested in their lives.
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It happened to me more than once that someone that I was following in this manner asked
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me if that when is our next date or something and so I have to explain again.
#
So, but no, I guess, but thankfully these conversations spanned years.
#
So I think towards the end, they kind of got it and we remain friends and based like, you
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know, I think the most important thing to do was to also tell them a lot about myself
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and I would talk about just daily lives, you know, the way that we did before this starting
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this podcast, we were like, you know, I woke up and did this and did that or my parents
#
or my sisters or whatever and that did make them feel a little more.
#
And I guess as long as you were completely upfront with them at the start, then that
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helps you get over the thing.
#
You know that you're not being deceptive in any way, even if they, even if yes, they are
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instrumental to your story, but they know that you're very clear about what you're doing.
#
So, I mean, this took me about three years to report.
#
I got married in the, in the middle of it and I told most of them that this was happening
#
and they had, they felt really connected.
#
They advised me, they asked me about the man's background and they checked him out on Facebook,
#
Some of them said that, you know, I should, marriage is a very important institution and
#
I must know that this is the right man and some of them like patronized about like the
#
values of marriage and like, you know, living a more responsible life from now on because
#
I, because I mean, obviously they thought I was a weirdo like being a woman and like
#
being in all sorts of strange places at all sorts of like strangers asking strange questions.
#
So when I decided to get married, I thought that maybe this is when I become like normal.
#
It's very interesting when you, you know, talking about marriage and strong opinions
#
One of the most fascinating parts of your book, which made me really sit up with my
#
eyes wide open was in that English class where you're sitting with Mohin Khan and he organizes
#
this debate on arranged marriage versus love marriage between the girls and the boys.
#
And it ends into a screaming match where they're shouting at each other.
#
Like it's pucks versus Congress on Twitter.
#
You know, that was the kind of feel I got from your writing where people who wouldn't
#
talk across the aisle, like the girls were almost segregated before the class and brought
#
in later when the teacher came because they didn't want to intermingle or suddenly just
#
screaming at each other and getting personal.
#
And what was that like?
#
It's another thing that we don't understand, but the whole like, you know, thing about
#
love and dating and sex and marriage, just there's so much anxiety and dilemma about
#
And especially in the case of women, because I made friends with some of these girls from
#
the English class and wow, their lives were very complicated.
#
I mean, each of them sort of knew that she had to ultimately go through arranged marriage
#
set by family, but they wanted before that to get as much out of life as they could.
#
So they had three or four boyfriends off Facebook who they were like hiding from each other.
#
And they were like three or four phones on which they were like playing this game.
#
And yeah, it was quite amazing.
#
And I think it's one of the reader questions we have, and I was going to ask you at the
#
end of the episode, but since it's just come up that your book is all about guys.
#
And I think that's with the exception of Richa Singh in one chapter, but I think that's kind
#
of natural because if you're looking at young India, a lot of what you visibly see is these
#
disaffected young men who don't have jobs and the women are sort of in the background
#
already suppressed, not so many options open to them.
#
Not such, not really strong actors in their own lives as so many of the men are.
#
Is that something you thought about during the book or you just went with what came naturally
#
that these are the subjects of my stories?
#
I wanted this to be on the mainstream because I think that as a journalist and I had been
#
working as a journalist for many years before I began this, I was interested in stories
#
of resistance against what was this mainstream, which was like male and young and in some
#
sense more North Indian than South Indian, more upper caste than anything else.
#
And so I just wanted to understand who these people are that oppress like every, like so
#
many kinds of, so many groups of people.
#
And the other thing I thought about was that I didn't want to make any effort finding anyone.
#
I was like, what if I just arrived in a place, walked on a street and start talking to people?
#
I will, that's the kind of thing that I wanted to do.
#
I was like, what is really like, who are these, like, you know, the most visible people, if
#
you leave your home or hotel in a North Indian town.
#
Our young men, they have very little to do, they are literally all over the place.
#
They are very eager to talk.
#
And I just, I had never spoken to them.
#
So I wanted to ask them what was going on in their lives.
#
A friend of mine who just came back from Bihar painted this picture to me where he said that
#
whenever he'd get out at a railway station or walk out on the street, he'd see this almost
#
surreal sight of many, many, many young men just standing there doing nothing.
#
One of the things I did reporting from Haryana a couple of months ago is just take random
#
photos of public spaces, you know, streets or railway stations or like bus stands or
#
Like with no frame in mind or any like structural ideas.
#
And I came back home and I started looking at the photos and like counting the number
#
of men that are there in every photo and it's amazing because all of these like pictures
#
They might be like one or two women and all of these places that I went to for reporting
#
in police stations and courts and so that, that does tell you something.
#
And I think it's those men that I wanted to speak to.
#
And it's kind of a haunting image, just men just standing there, hundreds of young men
#
not doing anything and that kind of makes you worried.
#
So I want to sort of now move on to questions about the second section of your book, the
#
anger section in a sense, but let's take a quick commercial break before that.
#
Hey, it's been another great week on IVM.
#
Are you following us on social media yet?
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If not, you definitely should be.
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We're IVM podcasts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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Last week we released a brand new show called Know Your Kanun with lawyer Ambar Rana.
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This week Ambar talks about the laws and rights related to sexual harassment in public spaces.
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On the Kinetic Living podcast, Urmi talks to none other than Rajesh Kumar aka Rosesh
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from Sarabhai vs Sarabhai to talk about his fitness transformation.
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On Shuneer One, we had an interesting conversation about all things money, insurance and more
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with Mukesh Kalra from ET Money.
#
On the Kolaba Cartel this week, Abhishek and Gauri talked to me about their philosophy
#
of building and organizing a team.
#
On the Seen and the Unseen, Amit Verma talks to the journalist and author Snigdha Poonam
#
about her first book, Dreamers, which chronicles the aspirations of a young India.
#
On the Pragati podcast, Pawan and Hamsari decode the concept and the meaning of the
#
term Swaraj with Professor Akash Singh Rathore.
#
We have also released a new podcast called Woody Wordpecker with Rachel Lopez, where
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she decimates a new word every week.
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I'm not revealing what this week's word was, so check it out to make sure.
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Also guys, we are hiring a new producer, a social media intern and a graphic designer.
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If anybody's interested, please apply to jobs at IndusVox.com and with that, continue with
#
Snigdha, welcome back to the show.
#
I now want to talk about the second part of your book, which really has two chapters dealing
#
on how people deal with their anger.
#
And the first of them I was sort of very struck by because your two main characters and that
#
one of them is someone who breaks up love jihads in Jharkhand, I think, right?
#
In Meerut, who breaks up love jihads and the other is a Gaurakshak.
#
And obviously these are not the two only sort of angry people you came across.
#
There's a lot of anger out there which you describe throughout your book.
#
But these are at the same time fairly representative of two of the typical directions that the
#
anger goes in, that it finds an outlet in tribalism, almost sort of instinctive tribalism
#
where in these two cases it becomes a question of Hindu pride and oh, Muslims are bad.
#
It finds these different kinds of outlets in the case of one inter-religious couplings
#
and the other cows and how widespread is this and you know, did you feel that this is the
#
most natural outlet for the anger?
#
I mean, one of the people that I describe in the book is very different though.
#
I mean, he's middle class, he's a very respectable member of the BJP, he's a part of their discussions
#
on elections and election management, et cetera.
#
And he's very different in that, you know, when I start speaking to him, he's talking
#
about big grand things and not like beating up people or breaking up imagined love jihad.
#
He's talking about Gandhi and Nehru and, you know, the imbalances of power in the world
#
and like civilizations, like histories and how to rethink them.
#
And so we keep having these conversations and I keep thinking that maybe something will
#
come out of this, but towards the end as it becomes more and more open with me, he brings
#
up some of the same things that these Bajrang Dal Karikartas in Meerut or the Gau Rakshaks
#
in Haryana bring up later, which is, you know, that Hindus have been treated badly in this
#
country or, you know, Muslims are reproducing too much or, you know, Dalits are taking all
#
the jobs or, you know, the women just don't know their place in the society anymore.
#
That's the same sort of stuff.
#
And I think that those are the same set of things that I kept hearing from like young
#
men at least like across North India, no matter, you know, what their social background.
#
And so, yes, it was pretty widespread.
#
I try to choose people who had more to say about that, whose stories were more complicated
#
than or like I could find something about them that wasn't obvious in these statements.
#
And you know, I'd always thought that tribalism or the tribal instinct in a sense is ingrained
#
And it's just that as societies progress more and more, you know, culture mitigates that
#
and there's no reason to be tribal and that instinct is sort of mitigated simply by culture
#
and enlightenment values and so on.
#
But what seems to be happening here is that tribal instincts evolved in times of scarcity.
#
And if you are living in a time of a scarcity of some kind in this kinds, whether it's of
#
jobs or whether it's of different kinds of opportunities, women in some of the cases
#
they can't in places like Haryana, they can't find women to marry.
#
So they become very angry with.
#
Like one of the quotes I noted down from that chapter is the gentleman in Karnal who told
#
you quote, since every girl in Karnal has a boyfriend, I don't know whether I will ever
#
I mean, look at the sex ratio of Haryana.
#
It will be very difficult for him to find a bride.
#
And he is concerned about that.
#
And that makes him very angry.
#
And he has to find an outlet.
#
So and therefore, are these people also in a sense India's incels?
#
You know, and are these therefore, scarcity of jobs, scarcity of sexual opportunities,
#
leading to this anger, which obviously will then take a tribal form?
#
It's almost inevitable.
#
And would you then say that is something that's gotten worse over the last few years and it
#
actually seems to be happening worldwide in different forms?
#
And if so, is it going to continue getting worse?
#
So first of all, I wish there was only simply a lack of opportunities that drove these,
#
you know, thousands of men across India to murder and mime people, but it's something
#
And I have now reported on Gaurakshaks alone for some years, and I've met so many kinds
#
You know, there are people who are middle-aged, you know, doctors, and there are 23-year-olds
#
who have ice cream shops and they're, you know, these guys in the book as an insurance
#
So it's not always that they don't have anything to do.
#
I think the source of their anger, sometimes it's deeper.
#
Sometimes it is not how they are doing, but how people who shouldn't be, you know, doing
#
that well are doing well or doing better than them, like in the case of this chap in Meerut.
#
He's angry at how, you know, the young Muslim men in his neighborhood have been able to
#
build houses or date attractive women that he would like to date.
#
So he's angry about all those things.
#
And you know, in some cases, it is about jobs, but it's not always about their own like lack
#
of opportunities or jobs or upward mobility.
#
They're equally angry about the fact that the people who should have remained below
#
them have now surpassed them in either income or education or attraction to women, really
#
And especially in some of the cases in the more patriarchal belts of North India, I think
#
Haryana for one, there was this deep rooted anxiety about how their families weren't respecting
#
them, you know, that their mothers and their bhabis and whatever, you know, the women in
#
the family or the older male members of the family was not giving them the kind of is
#
that that like a young man at that age should receive.
#
So that that also like played into this anger that some of them did turn guard carrying
#
gaurak chakras because of that, because they felt like if they did go out on these raids
#
night after night carrying revolvers and coming back with these amazing stories and WhatsApp
#
photographs of rescued cows and beaten up Muslim cattle smugglers, then they will regain
#
that kind of respect in the eyes of their own families, their own neighborhoods, their
#
own local police thana, their local RSS, shakhas, etc.
#
And that's kind of the scary part of this, like in a sense, if you have anger, if you're
#
driven to these tribalistic narratives, it would be okay if you express that on the internet
#
and you troll people on Twitter, but in your everyday life, you're forced to behave normally
#
because that's a society.
#
But in the case of all of these people that you've written about and that you mentioned
#
in that chapter, they are incentivized to actually act out their violence because that's
#
a way of raising their status within their in-group.
#
So it's not only that they feel this resentment, but there is actually, they raise their own
#
social status by in the case of the gentlemen in Meerut just beating up couples on Valentine's
#
Day, in the case of the gaurak chakras, just doing whatever it takes to sort of fight something
#
which is really imaginary in a sense.
#
And at the same time, and I hadn't fully even explored it by the time I wrote the last draft,
#
at the levels to which, because this is only happening right now, the levels to which that
#
anger is channeled institutionally, even in 2014 or 15 when I was reporting this book,
#
I found several smaller groups of Hindu interest cropping up everywhere, not just the usual
#
RSS and Bajrang Dal and VHP, but Akhil Bharat, this and that, or Meerut Shetty, this and
#
Are the kind of people who killed Kalburgi and Gauri Alpeshwara?
#
Yes, but now these groups are really multiplying, mushrooming, whatever you call it.
#
You can go on Facebook, type any city, the smallest of towns in India, and it'll have
#
at least like a dozen of these groups.
#
I just keep doing this from time to time just to track the progress of this trend, but the
#
They will have Akhil Bharat, blah, blah, blah, and there will be like dozens of these groups.
#
Some of these members will be common, but most of them will...
#
Each of them will be able to attract hundreds of people who are very active on Facebook.
#
Each of them wants to raise his profile on Facebook and WhatsApp through whatever fake
#
news they can spread or whatever real-time violence they can inflict and then take photos
#
And that's scary because it's mind-blowingly scary because it's a vicious circle in that
#
case because if you want to belong to a group in a small town, these are kind of the groups
#
you'll be drawn towards because...
#
It just perpetuates itself.
#
Yes, but because what happened, for example, in the case of the disruption of namaz in
#
Gurgaon, was that when I spoke to some of these young men who had disrupted the namaz,
#
they said that they had initially been trained as wrestlers in their villages, RSS, Shaka,
#
But RSS was a very moderate and modest reference point for them, you know, like a group for
#
So they had been looking for more and more aggressive leaders and organizations with
#
which to associate themselves.
#
One of them told me that he has now linked himself to this man, there's a long name,
#
Swami Paramanan something, something, and whose claim to fame is that he has built an
#
army of 1500 people in UP who will fight ISIS and all they do all day is just do arms training
#
and you know, this engage in this very alarmist view of the future of India.
#
And because ISIS, for this guy, ISIS was just not giving him the kind of like opportunities
#
for brazen violence against whoever is his enemy as he's desired.
#
So he has to leave that umbrella and choose like more and more extremist validation from
#
the Hindu interest umbrella.
#
And it's almost a race to the bottom.
#
Yes, it was a race to the bottom, which is what scared me that we keep thinking that,
#
you know, RSS is like taking over in India and we are all doomed, but there are worse
#
I keep talking about the Jan Sang Kham BJP that every leader made the previous guy look
#
So Atal Bihari made Shyama Prasad look moderate and then Advani to Atal Bihari and Modi to
#
Advani and Adityanath to Modi and somebody will one day horror of horrors make Adityanath
#
I went to a press conference of these all self-styled, extreme Hindu leaders and they said, you
#
know, Yogi kuch nahi hai, Modi has failed us, Advani toh bahut boda ho gaya hai and take
#
They were like Togadia has vanished after fear.
#
So it's us and it is going to be our revolvers and Lattis.
#
Which means inevitably they will never feel satisfied with any of the people who go into
#
politics because those guys will be moderated by necessary compromises and therefore eventually
#
these people will want to take the law into their own hands.
#
I mean that happened in the case of the Namazis in Gurgaon.
#
And that Swamiji's paramilitary force of 1500 people should just be airdropped to actually
#
But they will fight like Namazis in Gurgaon.
#
Yeah, in Gurgaon also, which is even worse or infidels like us who are born Hindu but
#
dare to be secular or whatever it is that we are.
#
And all of these people naturally are not just bigoted, but they're also deeply misogynist.
#
And that makes the fifth chapter of your book on Richa Singh from Allahabad extremely fascinating
#
where you describe about how Allahabad University is sort of a hotbed of young male violence
#
And no woman has ever stood for elections there because it's completely unthinkable
#
because in the power structures, they are just so suppressed that they're not even seen
#
in public during elections because there are violent young men roaming around.
#
Quote unquote, anything can happen.
#
And this young girl called Richa Singh decides that she is going to stand for president of
#
the Allahabad University Students Union.
#
And you describe the responses against her.
#
And did you sort of feel that her standing up against the patriarchy, as she puts it,
#
is sort of an aberration or is it a sign that things might be changing?
#
An aberration, I think, because when I'm winding up in the last, in the conclusion, and I try
#
to catch up with what was going on in the Allahabad student politics in the time that
#
I hadn't checked, few women had followed up.
#
The couple of elections that happened after hers were even more violent and women had
#
stayed away, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And she also got co-opted into the system, joined the Samajwadi party.
#
She got an MLA ticket there.
#
Did she win, by the way?
#
No, she lost because that was a sweep, but she's quite active in the Samajwadi election
#
Like, you know, she was very active behind the scenes of the Pulpur election or by-elections.
#
I mean, I don't know how cynical to feel about her being with the Samajwadi party, but I
#
wonder what else she could have done.
#
But what was telling to me is your detailed descriptions of the rage that the young men
#
of Allahabad expressed towards her, most of which was because she was a woman and not
#
because she was from the other party or whatever.
#
The threats that she got, for example, that if you come out of your hostel, we will rape
#
And do you think that rage would be the same all across small town India because of how
#
No, of course, it's more North Indian than anything.
#
I think that I would be joking if I said that this level of patriarchy and misogyny.
#
And I shouldn't even say North India.
#
I mean, some parts are worse than the others.
#
Like I grew up in a very different North India than the one that I encountered in Allahabad.
#
Because you're talking about decades and decades of that kind of male entitlement that you
#
feel that women shouldn't even come out at the time of student elections.
#
So it did blow me away in the worst kinds of ways.
#
And would you say this kind of entitlement is actually worse than previous generations
#
because these young people have been exposed to what's happening around the world and they
#
can see it, but they can't actually touch any of it themselves.
#
And that leads to greater anger.
#
And a lot of the anger that I described in the preceding chapter, young angry men, a
#
lot of their anger was also against women.
#
In most of these cases, they were angry that the women around them just weren't behaving
#
the way that the women should do, and in some cases simply that they had no hope of finding
#
Or in the case of the love, you know, the Bajrang Dal, Karikarta in Meerut, after a
#
whole day of like being hateful about everyone else, to me, he, I go back home, I go back
#
to my hotel, he goes back home and he sends me a message on WhatsApp saying something.
#
And I look at his display photo and it's a red teddy bear or something.
#
And I was like, wow, you're, dude, you're a softy for all your, you know, I'm going
#
to kill and finish all my enemies.
#
The metrosexual love Jihad warrior.
#
With the sensitive side.
#
He will beat up the couple and then he will cry for them.
#
Or then he will put makeup on their corpses.
#
Moving on to sort of the third section of your book, which was also kind of fascinating
#
and entirely expected in terms of that was a part of the book, which was sort of least
#
surprising to me in a sense.
#
I mean, a lot of things about your book were eye opening to me, but you know, the fact
#
that at one point in the book you say it seemed much easier to become successful feeding on
#
other people's dreams and following your own.
#
And you know, just to take a slight digression to economics, this is something like Jagdish
#
Bhagwati once said was a difference between China and India, where he said that in China
#
people tend to be profit seeking, but in India people tend to be rent seeking.
#
And I actually have a theory that this is partly because of the structures of our government
#
where government is so all powerful and so pervasive that the easiest way to make money
#
is actually to feed off that power in some way to either rent seek or to essentially
#
play a zero sum game where you're exploiting someone and not a positive sum game where
#
you're trying to do something which will create value in somebody's life.
#
And like even the English teachers, for example, the English teachers are playing that positive
#
sum game and the fixer are playing that positive game where they're trying to do things for
#
other people and they're both benefiting.
#
But a lot of the people in this last section of your book, the scammers, which I think
#
is much more representative of India and not just small town India today, but India since
#
I have, you know, in all the years that I've spent here is that people have this scammy
#
mentality of how can I exploit someone and make money rather than how can I sort of add
#
And if anything, I'd imagine that is probably getting worse because of the scarcities that
#
we sort of discussed that it's just this attitude that the one way to get rich or to make money
#
is to exploit somebody else.
#
You know, if you're not scamming somebody, you're getting scammed, that kind of mentality.
#
And I also felt that, you know, the people you mentioned in the first part of your book,
#
the guys who are making something out of their lives, Vinay Singhal or Bittifeed or Mohen
#
Khan, the English teacher, are in one sense the outliers, you know, in a sense they're
#
It would be the survivorship bias to say that that's your typical young Indian.
#
They are the lucky guys who despite, who actually sort of found that way.
#
But I would imagine that your typical young Indian would fall more in the people you describe
#
in your last couple of chapters, the scamsters who are either scamming or getting scammed.
#
Would you agree with that?
#
And I think that's like you couldn't have been more right.
#
You know, we were talking about this earlier, but a million people enter the job market
#
every month and we don't have any estimates, but maybe anywhere between 10,000 and 25,000
#
will find jobs in the formal economy.
#
We have a very vast informal economy in which hundreds of thousands of people must go as
#
delivery boys and drivers and small factory workers.
#
It still leaves out hundreds of thousands of people who are like even in this vast informal
#
I didn't understand that that world really well.
#
And so, you know, I mean, what I wanted to do for the last chapter was actually just
#
try to be a job seeker in the entry level market and try to get a job.
#
And this is what happened and most of the jobs that I found that I could be offered
#
did require me to pull some or the other kind of corn.
#
And so in a sense, yes, those are the majority of like, you know, the young Indians about
#
whom I was trying to write this book.
#
And you can't even blame them or make a, you know, judge them for it because, you know,
#
as you say in that chapter quote, as young men with no prospects, they are the biggest
#
victims and the whole world is a big scam, stop quote, which is kind of how they see
#
They're saying the world is a scam.
#
Why should we not scam others?
#
You know, you just you try to get on top of it.
#
Yes, I don't think that many of them start out by with the scammy mentality at all.
#
Some of them are really good at this job.
#
They are extremely good at you guard, you know, you show them a scam and they're like,
#
you know, pick up tricks of trade and matter of hours, they are very good at building a
#
network, you know, drawing like resources from other like stakeholders in the business.
#
You know, they can they can really scale up from four thousand pounds to forty thousand
#
So I also met some amazing like talent in the world of call center scams.
#
But the majority of like the foot soldiers, the call center executives that I met didn't
#
start out by buying being trying to being scammy.
#
In fact, so many of them drop out after the first day of training or after they were giving
#
a script or something because they just they just can't do it every day.
#
I receive an email from an ex scammer because obviously they can't go to the police because
#
like they are so afraid or whatever.
#
And they will describe to me the entire like modes of operation of their companies, addresses
#
like the the location details of the masterminds, the ways to like bust those companies.
#
And what's more important, there are justifications for why they did it to me.
#
And it's not really important, but I keep receiving them by I received one last week,
#
long one saying, you know, I pulled up this was an amazing scam.
#
You remember that the time they busted the IRS scam in Mumbai.
#
So the IRS was the American scam.
#
So because that was busted, they realized that, sure, the Internal Revenue Service in
#
the US is like onto them.
#
But there are, you know, like excise and tax state services in Canada and New Zealand and
#
So so that's that's how that spread.
#
So this guy was impersonating a Canadian tax officer every day and like scamming dozens
#
of people making lots of money.
#
And one day he's like he stops being able to sleep because he has like gone so many
#
years and people and so he writes me an email saying, this is my entire script.
#
It is so elaborate and sophisticated.
#
He tells me that he stopped being able to sleep and then he had to quit the job because
#
he can't take this anymore.
#
And then he gives me all the tips on how to bust this company in some sector in Gurgaon
#
I still haven't done it.
#
But are you going to do it?
#
I just I just might, but I've busted a few.
#
So millions of company owners from Gurgaon listening to this podcast now suddenly panicking.
#
No, but that remain the most common kind of scammer I met, which is, you know, arrive
#
from Jodhpur or Ludhiana.
#
They're inundated with like these job offers on the Internet of immediate incentives and
#
like crazy career growth.
#
They show up at a company, it's gone, they think bus domain a come tonight and then,
#
you know, I'll get out.
#
I'll have like I'll have like, you know, 40,000 in salary.
#
I'll have like a couple of lakhs in incentives and I'll I'll do something, mainly start up
#
It just doesn't work out.
#
There was this guy who told me that for two years he went from like a job ad to job ad
#
Like he said, my my kind of economy, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, everywhere I went, ma'am,
#
I was required to like do some some of the other like unethical thing.
#
At some point, he cheated someone who like an old guy who just wanted to change his Facebook
#
password, but didn't know how to.
#
So was so he looked up, you know, how to change it must be really old, how to change your
#
And there are companies who obviously based in India who advertise their services in that
#
So he called up this call center in India to change his Facebook password.
#
And the scammer to call his money in the bank.
#
And anyway, it's a sad story.
#
But many of them like have like sadder stories.
#
How to change your Facebook password.
#
And really sad because many of these scammers have been scammed into scamming.
#
So, you know, I have one last question for you.
#
But before I ask that, we have a bunch of questions, which your legion of followers
#
Of course, we put out a call on Twitter asking for people to send questions and we got nine
#
And there's a 10th question, which a friend of mine sent me on WhatsApp.
#
So we shall, which is again, a tremendous, we should advertise this on WhatsApp.
#
We should set up one of those.
#
You know, so many people who run all these WhatsApp groups, I met one who ran 100 groups
#
And the local BJP IT cell of Jharkhand, I think, was it Haryana, sorry, it's all the
#
I was born in Haryana people.
#
You weren't born in Haryana.
#
I was born in Chandigarh.
#
And my dad was in the IES in the Haryana carder.
#
So you could argue about bad things about me as well.
#
So here's one from my friend and he's been a guest on the show in the past.
#
The legal expert, Alok Prasanna Kumar, who asked a very good question.
#
If you had the power of a god to fulfill the dreams of one person you write about in dreamers,
#
who among them would you choose?
#
I think the English coach, the Mohen Khan.
#
Because he's actually adding value to the world and making the lives of others better.
#
His journey has been remarkable.
#
Are you still in touch with him?
#
I am still in touch with him.
#
So this was from Alok Prasanna Kumar at Alok Pai on Twitter.
#
Then Apekshita Varshini at Apekshita V asked a question about she quoted a para which Talib
#
had written about the fallacy people tend to commit when they talk about the youth.
#
I won't really ask that or quote that para because you're not committing that fallacy,
#
which is essentially the survivorship bias kind of thing.
#
I think you answer it yourself.
#
So since you're not committing that fallacy, we will not ask the question about it.
#
Then internetbindu at internetbindu asks, given lack of jobs, inequality, et cetera,
#
it seems India could be a lot more violent, like say South Africa or Mexico.
#
Do you think there's a risk of those countries' levels of violence in India?
#
You know, India has the world's second highest rate of murders after Brazil.
#
So we may not immediately see India as one of the most dangerous countries on this earth,
#
And also, if internetbindu like me lives in a big city, it's possible that they're biased
#
by their immediate surroundings and don't really realize how terribly violent small
#
And everywhere, I think there are, you know, I mean, Indians murder thousands of people
#
And the number one motive for those murders, if I'm not wrong, is personal vendetta.
#
And a lot of this personal vendetta, and this has been studied by at least a few people,
#
comes from these hundreds of millions of young people who are not gainfully engaged.
#
So there's a lot of anger and frustration.
#
I prefer the word gainfully engaged because that has multiple meanings, it addresses the
#
The issue also, and a lot of this violence is not something that you can ever measure.
#
For example, the implicit violence against women, which is constant and pervasive and
#
No, not just that, but I think that each kind of like violence and because I've been reporting
#
on conflicts for the newspaper job for so many years, but if you take class or caste
#
or gender or religion, I keep running into the same sort of like anger.
#
And it's always like, you know, young men at the center.
#
So we're already seeing that, we're already seeing the outcome of that in like the rates
#
of crime, the rates of like rapes and whatever.
#
And plus like there have been so many violent protests and riots over the last three, four
#
And I don't think that will lead up in a sort of Mexico sort of way, because we are so divided
#
that each group of violent young men have their own issues.
#
But we will see this like, like going ahead, I think that the whole isolated like groups
#
of men outraging, killing, miming across India will definitely go up.
#
I don't know what's your...
#
And also when you consider, you know, why are young men so violent and there's a biological
#
I was listening to this podcast with Robert Sapolsky recently who's written the excellent
#
And I think it was him.
#
And one insight I gained from that was that young men's brains develop fully only by the
#
So that's how long it takes to actually socialize.
#
Your brain is still developing, which is why you find so much violence in the years before
#
And women's brains develop, I think, by the late teens.
#
So they are already more chilled out, socialized, and you're likely to see less violence from
#
And of course there are various other cultural and biological factors for that.
#
But this is kind of interesting.
#
And there are also then deeper philosophical questions of should you hold a man at 30 necessarily
#
culpable for violence he committed at 20?
#
Because hey, he had a different brain.
#
I'm not arguing that he should, by the way, but these are just interesting sort of philosophical
#
And now there is a question from someone whose name on Twitter is rk2832.
#
But their Twitter handle, and I noticed this, is at rk28321, that extra digit at the end.
#
So I don't know what that means.
#
Because there may be other rk2832.
#
So he had to add a one to...
#
So just to clarify which rk2832 this is, the one with the one.
#
And this person writes, please ask her to do the same journey in South India.
#
And it would be interesting to compare both similarities and differences.
#
So I'm not going to criticize you for writing a book that you didn't set out to write.
#
But just speculating aloud, what do you think the differences would be if you went down
#
I have spoken to several young men in...
#
My apologies for assuming this.
#
They didn't feature in the book.
#
But yes, I think that it's less patriarchal.
#
I think that if there are aggressive men, then they aren't as visible and as outspoken
#
as you'd find in UP or Bihar.
#
Why do you think that is?
#
I think there are like, you know, the cultures in North India are, you know, there are obviously
#
some very clear reasons, I mean, education is really big.
#
You know, I mean, some of the things that men in South India take for granted, the men
#
such as I was speaking to in North India found very hard to grapple with, you know, the women
#
going to school or wanting to leave their homes or live in the cities or work.
#
Like those things agitated these men.
#
Whereas I think that in parts of South India, those have become norms.
#
So that's one of the reasons.
#
And I think there are like deep histories of patriarchy in parts of North India that
#
probably parts of the South haven't been subjected to.
#
There is a general kind of turbulence to life in North India for all kinds of reasons that
#
there isn't in the South.
#
But at the same time, I think plainly in terms of, you know, aspiration, I think I've heard
#
the same things from young men in Kerala and Tamil Nadu about outsized, like, you know,
#
dreams and ambitions and frustrations with where they find themselves in life.
#
So I don't think that that would have been that different.
#
But the responses to it are more modulated.
#
No, my last conversation with a 22 year old in Kerala went something the same way.
#
He said that he's like, you know, he can't take this.
#
He was going to the ways are different in that he was going to Gulf.
#
He said that he wanted to make a lot of money and he didn't have enough time.
#
So he was going to just immigrate in Dubai or Riyadh or something and just like make
#
large amounts of money.
#
Although he was like reasonably placed with his dad's factory back home, but it just wasn't
#
But at the same time, he was deeply traditional.
#
He had married a woman from his own community based on his parents' choices.
#
And he believed, you know, he wasn't like a liberal when it came to like women's choices
#
But in terms of like ambition, he just wanted to, he wanted no compromise.
#
I mean, I have friends who advocate for a United Nation of South India, which is distinct
#
And I think after reading your book, they'll say, yeah, we really need to do that soon.
#
The next question is from Mohit at Mohit Singh R. I presume there are the Mohit Singhs.
#
So he had to add them up.
#
How many Mohit Singhs must there be?
#
This I completely understand.
#
That's what the R stands for anyway.
#
So Mohit at Mohit Singh R asks, how are the aspirations of young married women changing?
#
I didn't really speak to that many.
#
But I deported some of the other stories I've felt that they, like most of them that I have
#
met want to work and but find that, you know, when you find like few opportunities of the
#
kind that they can they can afford, I mean, and this is like still partly North India.
#
But you know, there are so many things that like one of the things that I found interesting
#
was this whole beauty parlor revolution and how this was like the safest thing that married
#
women could do because it did not threaten their like, you know, husband's power and
#
privilege in the house because this was like a feminine job.
#
They could set up something in their own house.
#
So it didn't interfere with, you know, homely, wifely duties.
#
And you know, you could and yet, you know, you could this is a skill that is like actually
#
taught so widely and you can easily like sign up for a couple of months course that it doesn't
#
really it's affordable and no one minds.
#
And I wanted this is like this whole beauty parlor training revolution, something that
#
I started researching, but dropped out at some point, but I want to return to.
#
And I guess I'll have more answers by that time to the next book can be on beauty parlors.
#
My next book is a love story.
#
Oh, God, you've broken my heart.
#
The next question, it's a good question.
#
It's by stupidus suburbanum at Rajat Guru Raj and he asked, I notice in the book, even
#
though there are terrific descriptions of young people and their lives and struggles,
#
there is less in terms of a framework or a theory of understanding the choices that the
#
So the question is, what is a way of understanding this?
#
I really don't like frameworks.
#
If I wanted to deal with frameworks, I would have become an academic.
#
I don't want to be mean or rude, but I didn't write this book to explain things.
#
It was just stories that attract me.
#
And it just happened that I was attracted to some of these stories of young Indians
#
because they happen to be interesting and dramatic.
#
And sure, I cared about what adds up towards the end or what becomes of them or what becomes
#
of their future in these countries and the world.
#
But these are stories and you should make of them what you like.
#
We know enough about where India is at to make sense of them that I don't have to put
#
a paragraph after each scene.
#
But at the same time, I feel like there are so many books that at this point, if you wanted
#
to know about the white majoritarianism in the US, you could find.
#
And I wish that more people wrote books about this.
#
I mean, books of stories, books of ideas, books of frameworks around the topic.
#
And it's just I'm just like stuck in this position because I'm the only one who's written
#
And so many will ask me for what context or broader framework or solutions based set up
#
through which to see this.
#
And I'm not your person.
#
No, in fact, I have to endorse that and say that one of the things I really enjoyed about
#
the book and I found tremendously impressive was that it's great reportage with absolutely
#
You're not coming up with your own theories on why things are the way they are.
#
You're just and I completely by that point that there is space for those kind of books
#
I would have loved to read one before I started reporting this or while I sought answers.
#
We should put the owners from Stupido Sabarman and Rajat at Rajat Guru Raj to write those
#
My next book will have absolutely not a line of context or explanation.
#
What do you mean by that?
#
There is just a beginning, middle and end and there is like I don't you may not even
#
know where the where it's set.
#
So yeah, and I think storytellers are more important than framework setters because we
#
need the stories first and also framework setters mostly talk through their ass.
#
That will be edited out, no?
#
Yeah, said the famous framework setter himself, by the way, I have a framework for this as
#
Okay, so the next question is from Digambar Rana at Digambar Rana 07.
#
Please talk about consumerism, merits and demerits of it.
#
Not sure what he means by the question, but can I find a way?
#
Can you please answer this for me because I don't I'm not qualified.
#
I'm not sure what the question means or if the person has read the book.
#
But I suppose one way of rephrasing it could be that given that these people are living
#
on the Internet and they're exposed to so much American culture and Kylie Jenner or
#
whatever, is there also sort of a growing materialism?
#
For example, in the case of the person, the girl you mentioned who buys knockoffs of dresses
#
by Katy Perry or whoever.
#
And is that in much the same way as the knowledge of English is?
#
Is that a part of that whole recipe of aspiration?
#
And yes, I was surprised that three people who I spoke to who didn't know each other
#
were in different parts of India said the same thing to me when I asked them or I didn't
#
ask them about what their goals were in life.
#
And they said various things, but one was common to each.
#
And it was an Audi car.
#
And I thought how does that brand become so central to their imagination of the good life?
#
And I'll never understand because I'm not their age.
#
I don't know what they consume on a daily basis for them to think that Audi is like
#
So they want an Audi car basically.
#
Yes, they want an Audi car.
#
I mean, they said various things, farmhouses and people should travel the world, that sort
#
Or a company that's worth this million, this many millions or that many millions.
#
But Audi was like that constant.
#
This is very interesting because my mind flashes back to the Satyajit Ray film Pratidwandi.
#
So it's a film made in the late sixties as part of the Calcutta trilogy.
#
It's about an angry young man who's searching for a job.
#
Angry young man searching for a job.
#
And during the film when he's at his height of frustration, he sees a guy in a Mercedes
#
on the road, kind of knocks someone over or a driver and the crowd goes wild.
#
And I think they start stoning the Mercedes or something.
#
There's a close up of the logo, if I remember correctly, and he starts stoning it as well.
#
And it becomes a symbol of sort of aspiration and oppression at the same time.
#
And I think that the marketing people at Mercedes need to think strongly about how they've lost
#
out to Audi in the intervening four decades.
#
And then a friend of mine then told me about a man who's called Audi by his parents.
#
So that he can aspire to that sort of life goals.
#
And if you were to have kids, what would you name them?
#
I think having kids is immoral.
#
Where have I heard that before?
#
The next one is from Ishaan at Ishaan Seraph 179, quote, I simply loved her book, The
#
However, most of the stories in it are of North Indian people.
#
Could she also regale us with a few from the South Northeast?
#
We've already answered that.
#
Also, he says, what measures, according to her, are necessary for an increase in women,
#
labor participation rate, I'm sorry, in women, labor participation rate.
#
I mean, even in the first part of your book, you mentioned about how as more women are
#
entering the workforce, more women are dropping out.
#
There's actually been a decline in the female participation here.
#
So Ishaan asked what measures are necessary, but I'd also say, why do you think it's happening
#
I mean, a lot of women just put marriage as, as a reason, a lot of like, I think the patriarchy
#
has a huge role to play, because I think for men, it's...
#
But why is it declining?
#
I mean, the patriarchy has always been there.
#
No, but I think the, you know, if the, one of the first things that a man like does after
#
he has a job is to ask his wife to stop working.
#
And I think that's, that's what's happening.
#
In terms of measures, I think several, we don't realize the extent to which women have
#
to think about such factors as safety at workplace or mobility to workplace or, you know, streetlights
#
And so there are like so many, you know, I mean, challenges to be met on part of employers,
#
If you want to reverse that trend, these are just, these are just a few, like anecdotally,
#
these are just what women told me.
#
My guest in the last episode, Shruti Rajgopalan wrote about this recently for Mint.
#
So you can Google her piece on that.
#
And also, Devika Kher, who works at the Takshashila Institution, did a piece for the magazine
#
I added, Pragati, I think, Pragati.com, on what can be done about this and why it's rising.
#
So you can check those out.
#
And my final question, that is my final listener question.
#
I have a final question for you, which is separate.
#
My final listener question is from my friend, Gautam John, who asked me to ask you on WhatsApp.
#
He really loved your book.
#
He thought it was very insightful and interesting.
#
And the question is, how can we engage young men and boys towards gender-equitable outcomes?
#
Some people are already trying.
#
I have been, I mean, after the book came out, I have met people who have, you know, put
#
together initiatives that begin, that begin with talking to boys while they're in school.
#
And that's, I thought that was one of the ways.
#
I mean, if you can really begin there, then...
#
So I'll end with the one question I was saving for last, which is a standard question I asked
#
to all my guests on whatever subject they're talking about, which is what makes you hopeful
#
and what makes you despair about the future of young India?
#
What makes me despair is what I will describe first, which is that the most young people
#
that I meet, and all I do is meet young people, because every newsworthy story has at its
#
center young people, that, you know, I mean, it is very easy for them to say that the country's
#
future is over and their future is over and the only solutions to either resort to violence
#
or, you know, to start their own multimillion company or, I don't know, I mean, go the way
#
But what makes me hopeful is that for, I mean, when I was reporting this book, for example,
#
it took me two years, I met so many people who, when I first met them, seemed just like
#
So I met some of the men who were young, who were male, who were North Indian, who did
#
grow up in very traditional backgrounds, and yet they had decided that they weren't happy
#
with some of the things that they were being told that, you know, in whatever small ways,
#
whether in terms of expressing their voice in college politics or taking a stand for
#
women in their families or, you know, I mean, trying to remain hopeful about work in a place
#
where like several of their friends will just sign up for call center scams, they were like,
#
you know, I'm going to give this a try, this may work, this may not work, but they cared
#
about, they had some sense of right and wrong that they had personally, individually framed
#
and they were sticking to that.
#
And on that hopeful note, Snigdha, thank you so much for coming on the show, I learnt a
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do head on over to Amazon or your nearest
#
neighborhood bookstore if there still is one and buy her book Dreamers, highly recommended
#
I learnt a lot about Young India through that book.
#
Also you can follow her on Instagram and Twitter at Snigdha Poonam.
#
You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A and you can browse past episodes of the scene
#
in the unseen at scene unseen dot I-N.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did I just catch you on your way to work or did you end up pulling an all nighter?
#
Let me guess, you have a packed schedule for the day, the week and probably the month and
#
That's a lot for your mind to handle, don't you think?
#
This buzzing chaos also brings tons of negative thoughts, am I right?
#
Try spinning that bottle in a positive direction with me, Chetna, on the Positively Unlimited
#
podcast every Monday on IBM Podcast.
#
It's time to change your life, one alphabet at a time.
#
Give me a word, kya koi bhi line, kuch bhi ho sakta hai yaar, kya kaha hai aapne, topi?
#
Mohan Joshi hated wearing topis, he felt suffocated in them, topi pahante hi usse school ki yaad
#
aati thi, where of course he had no choice but to wear a topi.
#
And jis din pass out hua, ussi din usne apne topi ka bonfire bana diya.
#
And since then, he'd never worn a cap or a hat, na karakti dhoop mein and not even to
#
But from Monday 26th February, Mohan Joshi had to wear a topi all the time.
#
Because if he didn't, everyone around him knew exactly wo kya soch raha tha.
#
They knew that he was wondering how the girl in the yellow churidaar would look bina kapde
#
They knew when he was calling the boss a sadela tomato.
#
Re bhai, yeh hi toh story hai, aur yeh story aap hi ne mujhe diya, by giving me the starting
#
Yeh hi toh hai, the Croc's Tales, words aapke, kahaani aapke liye.
#
Catch the stories on Monday and Thursday on the IVM website, app and anywhere you get
