Different youth

When I was young, we were a angry lot. Nothing different from today really. I see angry youth everywhere. The difference is that living in a campus that provides a highly specialised education to young people of socially privileged background, I mostly see youth angry for reasons different from the ones that youth elsewhere have or the ones that we had to be angry about.

So, do I hear young friends unhappy about not implementing the constitutionally mandatory provisions of opportunities reserved for less privileged - No, not here. Are they unhappy about the gender ratio in the campus that remains skewed forever, nope. Are they concerned that there is no effort in moving towards a fair share of minority population in campus - no Sir! Or that there are majority biased rituals in official functions ignoring others, no. What are they angry about - they are upset that they have been asked to park motor-vehicles 500 m away from their dorms. And these are young people many of who keep dreaming of going to Western countries some day, where parking at large distances away from residential or office quarters is common. To be fair, there are more reasons, but nothing qualitatively different from the parking issue.

Someone posted on the FB a link to a movie on Calcutta (now Kolkata) made by Louis Malle that shows the student movement of 1968. Not that everything the young people wanted then was correctly formulated. Different times, and we who came to college in the seventies were also different. There were few campuses like ours then. Now there are many more accommodating the slightly larger middle class youth compared to then. Today there are young people in many areas of the country talking about real issues confronting this country. Issues like what Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze have indicated in their latest article in the Outlook magazine - a rising India with a proportion of underweight children population like in no other country of the world. There are events bringing young people to streets across the country - academic bigotry of removing reputed works from syllabi like the one by Ramanujan talking of multiple stories of Ramayana removed from postgraduate studies in Delhi university, or ongoing struggle by Irom Sharmila in Manipur against the presence of armed forces in the state and so on.

Well, I live with youth more concerned about things like right to drive bikes without wearing helmet and often on the wrong side of the road. Different youth, definitely.