What Millennials Want: Decoding the Largest Generation in the World. By Vivan Marwaha, Penguin Books. August 2021. 288 pages
Ashoak Upadhyay
A
t first glance the idea that India is the youngest country in the world appears slightly perplexing since most of us have been led to believe that it is ancient. Till you read some facts, put out by the CIA World Factbook for 2021, that more than half the country’s population is under the age of twenty eight years. By contrast the median age for the three leading economies, US, China and Japan is thirty eight, thirty seven and forty seven years respectively. That was in 2018; it was said then that three years later, two thirds of India’s population would be within the working age of twenty to thirty-five years.
What a bonanza! In this pandemic the bright light, a bountiful demographic dividend! Around fifteen years ago the United Nations Population Fund laid out a definition that would inspire India’s politicians and policy wonks to flights of fancy and pride for years to come:
: “the economic growth potential that can result from shifts in a population’s age structure, mainly when the share of the working-age population (15 to 64) is larger than the non-working-age share of the population (14 and younger, and 65 and older)
In the years following this pronouncement the economy seemed to bear out its potential. Vague as the definition was, overgeneralized as its claims may have ben, the first term of the UPA government laid the grounds for euphoria with climbing GDP growth, a steady rise that would culminate in its second term. But did this high growth of that blind metric, the GDP, that Little Big Number, pay out dividends to the young in terms of sustainable jobs? Did employment show a commensurate rise?
Various data through the years provided unsettling evidence to the contrary. Liberalization and technology changes, the decline of trade union activism, its absence in the growing IT_BPO sector caused disruptions in both the character of employment and the quantity of work available, not to mention the first ruptures in the cherished notion of jobs as stable foundations for a decent life.
Fraught with per formative swagger, the notion of Demographic Dividend seemed to legitimize the one-way relationship between individual effort and national gain, best summed up in the metric of growth. The nation was to get the dividends of an immense population of youngsters putting their shoulders to the wheel. When the GDP growth rate began to falter, as it did soon after 2016, the demographic dividend was seen as a nightmare. Sadanand Dhume, the liberal who had placed so much faith in Modi’s capacity to create a shining India could only tweet that India’s vaunted demographic dividend could turn into a demographic disaster.
Against this backdrop of falling employment and falling growth numbers, Vivan Marwaha’s What Millennials Want adjusts our distorted frames of reference by unpacking that asymmetrical relationship the term demographic dividend connotes, opting for the more precise, unloaded term Millennials, the definition of which may not differ substantially from the United Nations’ one delineating the demographic bulge at the core of the magic dividend that was to accrue. Marwaha starts with a more prosaic assumption than the roseate presumptiveness of the DD word. Millennials he states in the Introduction are the future of India. It’s not clear at this point as he sets out on his journey of discovery what he thinks the future will be like; will it be a dividend or a disaster?
Born between 1981 and 1996, Indian Millennials, and as Marwaha points out he is one too, number more than 440 million, “the largest millennial cohort on the planet.” The author had set out to tap the aspirations of representatives of this swathe of the Indian people just prior to the 2018-19 state and general elections travelling to the Hindi belt, mainly Madhya Pradesh to Kerala, Bengaluru, Mysore, Mumbai and other parts though not to J&K and the north-east The largest cohort does not constitute a cohesive unit in terms of social economic status; they obviously reflect the diversity embedded in India and its history; gender, caste, region and linguistic differences play their part in defining their consciousness. In that sense they are probably not very different from preceding generation of the young—midnight’s children.
. What marks this lot, however is one singular facet of their existence, that alters their consciousness imbuing it with tremendous potential—and anxiety. The author hones in on this facet as his point of departure but the journey he will take us along this line of investigation will tturn out to be fraught with consequences foretelling uncertain futures; not at all the type the authors of the DD or even its nightmare, like the liberal Dhume could have foreseen. To look through the fog of national indices of growth behind the veil of the GDP number, they would have had to feel the existential pulse of the millennial. Marwaha does that.
With a combination of ethnographic style interactions and secondary data, the author offers the reader a clinical yet empathic reading of millennial consciousness; the writing free mercifully free snore-mongering pomposity or vicarious journalese.
His journey begins where it should: education
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“You become an engineer first then figure out what to do with the rest of your life.” p 68
In the evolution of post-Independence education, 1961 is a historic year because India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru had identified solution to what was seen as a major hurdle to India’s modernization: lack of a managerial class for the nation’s emergent public undertakings and the fledgling private sector. That year the first two Indian Institute of Management campuses were set up; one in Calcutta and the other in Ahmedabad. Two IIMs soon grew into twenty. THz two pioneer institutions set the tone and agenda of higher education in India for aspiring youth eager for jobs in multinationals, careers in foreign capitals: management education became the trope for success but here was the problem: as demand for entry into the IIMs grew, so did the bar rise for entry. Private colleges stepped in help applicants meet the rising filters restricting entry into the sacred portals.
It was not lack of financial resources alone that filtered out the vast majority of applicants, a process that willy nilly earned the instructions an exaggerated reputation for excellence and its students a privilege far above those from the institutions outside the portals, but an education system that ill-equipped a vast majority to meet the stringency of entry into the haloed grounds.
Marwaha’s ethnographic encounters capture this tangle of private hustling and State indifference to the rising aspirations millennials poignantly. In October 2018 he meets a 25 year-old daughter of a household cook in Delhi’s Safdarjung Enclave who will try desperately, three times to get into the IAS. Her father runs up debts to pay for what are clearly indifferent coaching classes and three times she fails in her ambition to carve out her own destiny rather than submit to the demands of custom and an arranged marriage. In 2017, 450,000 Indians sat for the UPSC exams, desperate for a slot in government service, only 990 made it and she wasn’t one of them. (46-7)
Marwaha has other such stories tinged with a tragic destiny, each story an epic of failure and not for want of trying. The fact is that there aren’t enough jobs; despite the bravado of the Prime Minster about creating seven crore jobs every year, the irrefutable fact is that the number of jobs isn’t anywhere close to meeting the requirements of the millennial swelling the ranks of job seekers
As Marwaha points out, the system of failure creates its own cycle of futile activity and indecisive thought: millennials enter an endless cycle of education in the hope that the doors to a secure world of jobs will open for them. Somewhere the reality that they are victims of a heartlessness strikes at their core and in a surprising reversal of aspirations, in a move that seems almost anti-modernist in its aspirations revisionist, the millennial turns her back to the private sector. In 2016 according to a CSDS survey Marwaha cites, 73 per cent of the millennials interviewed preferred government jobs to private sector ones, up 23 percentage points from a decade earlier.
The desire for a sarkari job sucks the millennial into an endless round of education! Or what passes for one in private coaching and tutorial institutes, many with dubious set ups. Citing the same CSDS survey Marwaha offers this astonishing data: more than a third of the interviewees listed “student” as their occupation and as the author tells us Vinita, the struggling IAS hopeful was part of that segment.(50)
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“You might be Suffering from Capitalism” (53)
Is it any surprise that education has become big business? With the opening up of both primary and secondary/higher education to private capital, a new sub-class of property dealers and kulaks has turned academic degrees into a roaring business in what is clearly a parody of that long cherished belief that education counts. What students learn is quite another matter.
But at some time the millennial will venture out into the marketplace and find that the nature of the “job market” has radically altered. Marwaha mentions “jobless growth” but the shift towards a less labour-oriented regime has acquired more subtle and devastating tonalities for millennials. Digital technology has proved to be more destructive than Schumpeter could have imagined; digital technology replaces it does not refine or upgrade skills; labour does not shift to a higher curve of skills and employment as he had thought technology would enable; this time around, the new technology does not shape up but ships out labour.
Marwaha does not cover this part of the process that began with liberalization in 1991 when the formal sector took to technological innovation. Too, the collapse of trade union activity and collective bargaining tipped the scales against labour as did the introduction in the first decade of the 2000s of contract labour. Marwaha cites ICRIER studies on a form of employment that is temporary in nature, contractual and with stripped down compensation. (60)
But that is not all. India’s informal sector has always been based on such temporary jobs. It was evident in the early part of the last decade that such informal conditions of employment were embraced enthusiastically by the formal manufacturing sector too. And when the gig economy made its way into the country contract or temp jobs really took off. In fact a new discourse was steadily built up to legitimize such stripped down conditions of work, as lobbyists such as the Staffing Federation of India took to peddling the distinct advantage of contract labour for the employee and especially the young—the millennial.
Is it any surprise that according to CSDS surveys the author cites, in 2016 more than a third of the millennials surveyed preferred government jobs to private ones, up 23 percentage points from a decade earlier. Small comfort that. As Marwaha tells us, the millennial is caught in an endless cycle of education and disappointment. Data are now part of the discourse, those humungous number of hopefuls lining up for limited number of low-level jobs in government sectors, in the railways, in the police forces. Severe anxiety creeps in If jobs are out of reach in the government; employment in the gig economy is “unstable and shifting” (p 81); disappointment and anxiety widely prevalent more so among older millennials—between the age of thirty and thirty-six years—the feeling that “they had already missed the boat.” Their futures appear bleak, filled with apprehension “about unforeseen events that could affect their economic well-being—health of parents, children education and the like. (84).
A senseless education trap, futile and shifting job goal posts, rising anxiety. As degrees, dreams turn to despair and self-confidence teeters, the selfie moment becomes restorative.
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“Selfies and social media platforms where they are uploaded, get young Indians to do something incredibly powerful and new—define themselves on their own terms” (88)
The selfie and social media platforms seem to provide opportunities for exercises in self-definition through virtual bonding. Sumeet Samos a Dalit millennial found his voice and community of well-wishers on social media platforms. A rap singer with the title of The Lit Boy, inspired by American rapper Tupac, Samos took to YouTube to reach his message of outrage at the oppression and discrimination to a vast audience through songs off protest and an articulation of caste oppression. A post-graduate in Latin American Literature from JNU when Marwaha met him in 2018, Samos spoke of his experiences in caste discrimination within Left student politics. (90).. Born in a basti in Korapet Odisha, Samos is now, three years later on his way to Oxford University thanks to crowd funding on social media through which he was able to raise the resources for his tuition.
Marwaha cites the case of Nazneen, a millennial from Hyderabad who managed to escape a harrowing experience of physical abuse from her husband in Dubai and found her destiny as a single parent through the social media that threw up opportunities for a vocation that gave her the mans to acquire self-esteem and sustainable means of livelihood as owner of a beauty salon.
But these are exceptions to the general trend that the author found. Social media and the selfie haven’t done much to improve the lot of the millennials in terms of their aspirational urges and the lack of opportunities they face. The case of Ravindra shows up the extent to which such platforms can, in fact ‘classrooms’ of toxic falsehoods. An Uber driver in Mumbai, Ravindra despairs of ever putting his coaching stints and degrees acquired with such expense and expectations to their promised use—employment in a government job. Whatsapp, as Marwaha finds in a conversation while being driven around the city, contextualizes his anxieties through weird spins on conspiracy theories—Jinnah was a woman and in cohorts with Gandhi to split India, articulated without a trace of irony or skepticism.
Social media helps local frictions become national news. And millennials are privy to the toxicity the ‘manufacture of ignorance’ this conflation generates. As Marwaha tells us: “In particular, social media users are pommelled so frequently by narratives against Muslims that it becomes almost impossible for those who consume this content, even passively, to not believe some of what they see.” (p 101)
Coupled with a surprising conservatism about marriage or intimate relationships not sanctioned by religion community caste and parents, millennials tend to reflect the paradox of a society that seems to fit Guy Debord’s definition of the Spectacle as an image that obfuscates and legitimizes hegemonic social relations. Talking to the author just before the 2019 elections about voting preferences, Riddhi Chaddha, a young millennial, offers up a gem of profundity: her wedding was modern but her marriage has been traditional. (116)
The spectacle of modernity that the wedding symbolizes, foregrounds the experiences of a life of subjugation to the husband, an experience that could be seen as an allegory of the condition of millennials Marwaha writes about. The passage of rites spell the stations of modernity—education, aspirations for a place in the urban setting away from the village economy, a paradise epitomized by the world Infosys has built in Bengaluru. But the experience of life slides them, with a lot of help from social media mis- and dis-information, into a traditionalism of caste religious biases. Their anxieties bred in the assembly rooms of mass education and coaching factories leave them with dreams and degrees and creeping despair at ever making it.
Unsurprisingly, millennials become prone to social and political discourse that centers on a strong personality, an alter ego as it were. Given the history of misgovernance, corruption and falling status, Narendra Modi comes across as the knight in shining armour promising jobs, cleansing politics and most of all, sending out the message not of ‘Yes you Can’ but “Yes I did it” to the millions not borne into privilege. Couple this with the muscular weaponised discourse of Hindu nationalism and the seduction was complete in 2014 and continues. A lost and flailing millennial found the BJP discourse not toxic but an emollient for his acute anxiety about the self. Never mind the fact that the muscularity of political discourse from the PM targets Pakistan, the perfect example of the Other and not China even though it has done far more to tamper with and transgress Indian borders.
Marwaha tells us that one of his interviewees does not practice caste discrimination, has never seen it being inflicted but then if you live in silos and interact only within one’s class and caste that are correlated (123), how could you reckon with this social infliction? Another millennial Basant, does not visit temples but “he identifies himself as a Hindu” Identity is the key word here. Millennials in small towns and urban metropolitan centers may never have read the scriptures. the Gita, in fact a large number the author met have not. But they call themselves Hindu and strongly believe in that identity some enough to demonise other religions or buy into thee false discourses on social media.
Religion, as Reza Aslan has pointed out variously in his several books and talks, is primarily a matter of identity. And carried to its extreme it becomes a weaponised identity that includes the demonization of the Other. And Marwaha recognises this distinction at the end of his first round of field interviews in February 2018 when he says: “Religion, in most cases, was in most cases was more a matter of identity than spirituality.” (130)
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“Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift…” Bob Dylan
For Marwaha the “biggest challenge” confronting Indian millennials is that unlike in other parts of the world, they are clubbed with other sections of the population; policymakers therefore do not, as they do in the USA for instance “view them as a unique dynamic generation that faces its own set of opportunities and challenges” (176). At first glance this appears strangely out of sync with the reality in the States where student debt, frighteningly high as it is, bears devastating testimony to how little millennials matter to policymakers; businesses view them as commodities and their working conditions are anything but safe and secure, Leave alone the fact that for more than two decades, jobs have been moving out and automation proceeding apace rapidly, the closure of much of American manufacturing has led to deleterious consequences on the older generation to be sure but the millennials are no less affected by the scarcity of jobs and the insecurity of whatever they do get.
Marwaha finds fault with Indian politicians who “rather than outline a proactive set of policies …use millennials’ anxieties as an electoral weapon” (176-77). He points to the manufacturing (presumably he means the formal) sector that has not grown fast enough to cater to the growing segment of educated youth seeking jobs. He blames both parties for not attracting the kind of investments that would create more jobs; capital-intensive industries, he avers, was the key to Indian industrialisation. So employment lost out.
But it is a moot point if more sensitive governments than India has been saddled with would have made a substantial difference. It hardly needs to be stated that capitalism runs on its own logic and what we have been facing since the new millennium in particular is the kind of capitalism whose essential features Maratha has so graphically captured. Labor displacing automation, a dumbing-down of work for those who can get it, contract employment that pares labour or variable costs and, a conscious attempt to keep out collective organization for bargaining. We are witnessing the emergence of an oligarchic form of capitalism wherein capital is heavily concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small number bent on a form of industrialisation that will exacerbate the disenfranchisement of work and its rewards. And we will be persuaded by the image of the Spectacle to celebrate this triumphalism of capital in an age of bigotry.
Much as one would not like to say it, the reality of capitalism will turn more exclusionary for the millennials; the current slide in employment is not just pandemic-driven; it has been declining for years. Pakora jobs will not help the millennial live sustainable lives as Marwaha also lets us know in a sort of deconstruction of daily earnings from the sale of India’s favourite snack. Call center jobs will shift out; start-up companies that have matured and add the sheen to India’s shining image such as Infosys and other IT firms will employ lesser number of professionals in dumbed-down jobs. At the job fair organized by the Delhi government in January 2019, Marwaha’s hawk-eye observations found the auguries of uncertain futures and a puerile Present.
A packed stadium with millennials, parents moving from stall to stall, few companies the author could identify among them Ola looking for 500 ‘driver partners’, Patanjali 100 marketing interns; most firms wanted sales reps: abysmally low pay for low grade jobs for candidates with degrees that seemed to some he spoke with, not commensurate with the low level of work, or pay. (64)
Sales jobs: Low pay low grade. The day shift for twenty years of classrooms.
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In December 2019, Marwaha reached Kerala for the final part of his survey of millennials. He met dozens of millennials in cafes, restaurants, listened to their conversations, participated in them and also took in its rich history. And he came up with illuminating hints as how the tightening Gordian knot of triumphalist capital and nationalist bigotry had bypassed Kerala. Its history has left the Present memories of tolerance in which at the very least, religious communities stay cheek by jowl without overt hostility. The combination of high education and literacy levels, lack of a heavy industry-based capitalist class, in part scared off by its Communist governments and unionist tendencies, has allowed for the growth of entrepreneurship among migrants returning from West Asia, the ‘Gulf’. The author hastens to clarify that he is not holding up Kerala as a role model nor “romanticizing” the state. He just found millennials in Kerala “ a generation less divided among itself” (201). “No simmering sense among young people that other religious or social communities are to blame for their anxieties and struggles” (203)
In Kerala he discovers “potential “unifiers” that he admits (hopes?) exist elsewhere too. But for a start that’s good enough for us all. Perhaps the discovery and decoding of those “unifiers” could form another project for this clear-eyed empathic observer.
Heaven knows we need it.
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Also Read four-part series The Lives We Lead in The Beacon
Colouring Within the Lines: Press in the Hall of Mirrors
Weeding Out The Weak: Ways of Living
Remembrances of a Dead Soul: Notes on Mournful Reality
Pre-Pandemic Social isolation: Automated Lives
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