Snigdha Poonam is a journalist based in New Delhi. Her work has appeared in the
Guardian, the
New York Times, the
Caravan,
Granta and other publications. She currently reports on national affairs at the
Hindustan Times. She won the 2017. 'Journalist of Change' award of Bournemouth University for a work of reportage that appeared on Huffington Post.
Dreamers is her first book.
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 CROSSWORD JURY AWARD FOR NON FICTION*
More than half of India is under the age of twenty-five and the country is set to have the youngest population in the world by 2021. But India's millennials are nothing like their counterparts in the West.
In a world that's marked by unprecedented connectivity and technological advancement, in a country that's increasingly characterized by ambition, political power and access, in an economy that appears to be breaking down the barriers to wealth that existed for every previous era, this is a generation that cannot - will not - be defined on anything but their own terms. They are wealth-chasers, attention-seekers, power-trappers, fame-hunters. They are the dreamers.
Snigdha Poonam's remarkable cultural study of the unlikeliest of fortune-hawkers travels through the small towns of northern India to investigate the phenomenon that is India's Generation Y. From dubious entrepreneurs to political aspirants, from starstruck strivers to masterly swindlers, she travels - on carts and buses, in cars and trucks - through the India's badlands to uncover a theatre of toxic masculinity, spirited ambition and a kind of hunger for change that is bound to drive the future of our country. These young Indians aren't just changing their world - they're changing yours.
A story of India can't be complete without drama and emotions, and Dreamers is not devoid of it.'Dreamers smashes the slick hype that has been constructed around India's aspiring middle classes, calling our attention to the corruption, frustration, and dashed hopes bubbling beneath the surface.''This craving for respect is replicated at every level, and it is this which may have more of an impact on India's place in the world in coming decades than any economic success the country might have.'An anecdotal study of eight young persons from small-town India who would snugly fit into the description of "neo-middle class"'The characters we meet in Dreamers embody both the unprecedented aspiration enabled by liberalisation, and the consequences of our collective failure to enable its fulfilment.''A study of young lives in small-town India paints a deeply troubling picture of economic anxiety and rising chauvinism'
