Snigdha Poonam is a journalist based in New Delhi. Her work has appeared in the
Guardian, the
New York Times,
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.
With more than half of India under the age of twenty-five, 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 is marked by unprecedented connectivity and technological advancement, in a country that is increasingly characterized by ambition, access, and political power, 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 north 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 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.
