The young of mainstream India are too embattled to dream big

Sapped by the hustle of the here and now, youth aspirations are limited to low-pressure jobs offering stability and security

- MATHANGI KRISHNAMURTHY & RAMA BIJAPURKAR

"Aspirational Young India" is a ubiquitous phrase whose taken-for-granted meaning is the intense desire and striving for material and social betterment. It assumes a well-directed action orientation around focused goals and a kinetic energy that powers India forward. Our study started with no such preconceived meanings. It performed an emic or insider's deep dive into the contours of aspiration for the world of mass or mainstream young India, a world described in our previous column in Mint ("Young India is fuelled by agency but is being failed by structure," 24 March) as one of exhausting entropy where agency comes up against the paucity of structures. In this piece, we focus on how to understand and read their aspirations and accompanying anxieties.

Our most telling finding was that for so many of our respondents, the aspiration was a government job, a coveted position of stability and security. This holy grail, we thought, had disappeared a few generations prior. However, it showed up with telling regularity, its contours apparently having been mulled over in their minds for a long time. "I want a Central government and not a state job," was also often a clear preference. Their many efforts towards this long-term hope ran parallel to their acts in the here and now, trying to willy-nilly pass qualifying exams, often in multiple attempts. Many respondents found themselves chasing this goal for years; responses such as "Dream job is UPSC [short for Union Public Service Commission] and all the rest I have not thought about," testify to the stickiness and stuck-ness of this aspiration.