I met a couple of 21-year-olds last week. Let’s call them A and D. They were apprehensive about their names being revealed because they were in their final year in college and did not want any issue cropping up with the authorities. We were discussing the youth, their choices and their political views.
One of them, A, bluntly told me, “Every time a person from your generation scoffs at a millennial for being impatient they conveniently choose to ignore the facts staring them in the face. It is your generation that is destroying this world. Keep in mind, yours is the generation that set West Asia on fire, tanked the global economy and ignored a dying climate that will affect us – the millennial – not you, because you will probably be dead and gone by then.”
While I was still recovering from that, he said, the problem with the coverage of youth issues is that a bunch of 40+plus-year-olds is making decisions about what the youth want. “Take education. For all talk of reforms in the past 10 years, public education is sub-standard and private education is still not affordable. I don’t say this with smugness but with sorrow because I am a product of the same public education system. Having almost completed my graduation, I consider myself a survivor because nothing stifles a child’s creativity more than an SSC board education. When I visit my alma mater my teachers tell me, they would not ask the children to study in public schools like this one, so poor is the quality of education there now.”
He said he was fortunate that his parents had the resources for him to engage in private undergraduate education but there were so many of his classmates who wanted to be engineers and doctors who scored just as much as he did but could not get into a medical or engineering college because of reservations and just could not afford a private college. So they ended up doing BCom or BSc and are now working at a call centre. There are always exceptions such as Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and APJ Abdul Kalam to this rule, but the system still puts its products at a disadvantage, he said ruefully.
“So, when we take these issues up with our elders they either point to some opinion polls and surveys on paper that reinforces the notion they already disbelieve or they dismissively ask us “why don’t you do something to change it?’ The answer to that is simple. It is not my job yet. It is the job of today’s ruling classes,” he said bluntly.
He said, however, that many of his friends actually would not mind still voting for the BJP but there are a few things that stick in their throat – one is the incessant need of the government to be the moral police in the country. “Look at the way goons attempt to disrupt a rock show or Valentine’s Day or Sunburn Festival. Or, when hooligans and vigilantes intimidate and thrash college-going couples because they are holding hands. I don’t claim they are state-sanctioned but it is obvious who they are. What gives them the right? And I am not objecting to the police stopping under-age drinking or drunk driving. That should be stopped along with the rampant use of drugs on campuses. But I do object to turning the state police into the ‘fun police’.”
By now he was in full flow. “Take the issue of internet porn or the attempt to censor content on Netflix and Amazon Prime. It might sound silly, but in this day and age, who is the government to decide what we should or shouldn’t watch? And please stop being hypocritical here. MLAs have been caught watching porn in the assembly and they are the ones who want a ban on it because ‘it corrupts’ the youth? Grow up, half the youths who have mobiles watch porn on it. And it is not males alone. Females too watch porn – a lot. Whatever their reasons may be to watch adult content, it doesn’t absolve the government of behaving like a policeman? And this government expects the youth to vote for them after behaving like controlling nannies? Of course, if we ask our elder siblings in previous governments if it was any better for them the answer would probably be a resounding ‘no.’”
“I will say one thing though, the censor board has become a lot more lenient since ‘sanskari’ Pahlaj Nihalani stepped down and Prasoon Joshi took over,” his friend D said.
So do you wonder why so many of the young people like me are disillusioned with politicians, D asked? “It is because neither of the two major political parties represents us or what we stand for – a better political system, an improved education policy, an end to stifling restrictions, curbing vigilantism of all types, and religious fanaticism. I don’t claim to speak for my entire generation. We have a diverse variety of problems but these issues do overlap for all of us. Take this state’s politicians. See the Shiv Sena, they act like idea-free ideologues. NCP combines the corruption of UPA 2 with the behaviour of the MNS. Congress, when it was in power proved to be toothless, incompetent and corrupt, and still is. And the BJP has not yet proved to be the change they promised.”
“The 2019 election is the first-ever I am going to vote in, and I could still vote for Narendra Modi because I believe he deserves one more chance to make the changes he had been promising. But what after him or what if something were to happen to Modi before 2024,” A asked? “A lot of people would like to see Yogi Adityanath as PM after Modi. If that happens, I will not vote for BJP again. The thought of an India under that guy scares the hell out of a lot of us.”
“So tell me, after everything we have told you, would you blame us for not voting at all? And if we decide to, can you understand our predicament?”
Been There Done That 