Anger Of The Jobless Youth

Their frustrations in an unjust world can take various expressions—a fidayeen in iraq, a stone pelter in kashmir, a mercenary in saudi arabia, a rabid gaurakshak (cow protector) in India or a hedonist in shanghai.

- Rakesh Kalshian

…milega ilm-e-jihalat-numa se kya un ko nikal ke madrason aur universitiyyon se ye bad-nasib na ghar ke na ghat ke honge main puchhta hoon ye taalim hai ki makkaari karodon zindagiyon se ye be-panah dagha…

(What can possibly the young gain from the useless knowledge dished out by madrasas and universities? Dazed and confused they appear, these wretched souls Is this education or pure scam, I wonder What treachery with countless lives!)

FIRAQ GORAKHPURI, the irrepressible Urdu poet, penned these lines almost four decades ago, but they have a hauntingly contemporary ring. While his quarrel over the nature of pedagogy remains ever moot, the blight on the promise of youth today is probably far more pernicious.

To get a sense of the scale of the betrayal, chew on this disturbing statistic: according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (oecd’s) Economic Survey of India, over 30 per cent of India’s youth (about 120 million) is neither employed nor in school or in any kind of apprenticeship. Add to this a crumbling welfare state, rising inequality, a rapidly changing economy that constantly needs new skills, a consumer culture that feeds on ever-new material fantasies, a never-ceasing carousal of violence, and, not to mention, a traditional society struggling with what novelist V S Naipaul described as a million mutinies, and you have a potential tinderbox.