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Three friends gather in a café. A sweetshop on the edge of the formerly sandy parking lots in Gurgaon’s Leisure Valley. Those lots are now stacked with food venues, restaurants and breweries and restobars with neon signs glinting dully in this concrete heat. It’s not just the parking lots that have changed — it’s the friends themselves, and what they now have to do. College has ended. There is something like a “life path” that needs to be followed.
How does one do that; how does one begin to attempt it? For one of them, the path is simple. She has wanted to work in wildlife conservation since she was ten years old. She interned with a leading wildlife research institute in India, and then got a job there. The job pays minimally — four figures a month — but it is a job, and it is a job that pertains to the domain she wants most to be involved in. She has resigned herself, not with pain but with joy, to earning minimally, like researchers and zoologists do. She cannot sustain the lifestyle of her parents, the life that she has enjoyed as her own: the condominium, the two cars, the upper-middle-class life of formerly middle-class people who made it big, earned that elusive thing called financial security.
There is a sense, a certain tone with which upper middle-class Indians talk about their career and lifestyle — a strange sense of purpose. “We just did this because we had to. And look today. Now, we have to keep this going forward.”
Maybe now they can even be considered upper-class, can they? Does she worry about not being able to provide an upper-class life for herself right now, possibly for the next five years too? She has found the thing called value in her life, the thing that for middle-class Indians used to be getting a stable job, imagining a world where money was not hard to come by — it was government jobs for our grandparents, multinational corporation jobs for our parents. For us, it is about finding the thing that lights us up with joy — for her, that is what it is about.
There is no longer the question of whether to be practical or emotional. For her, they are one and the same. She consoles the second girl at the sweetshop. Her passion is wildlife, too — she studied zoology in college. But now, back home in Gurgaon, she finds it sweltering, suffocating. Her parents went to business school, and work in marketing consultancy. This life, they feel, has been built carefully and with effort. It needs to be respected and upheld. The world that their children know did not just spring up from around their feet — they wanted for nothing because their parents did not get sidetracked by what they wanted to do, instead doing what would be most beneficial.
There is a sense, a certain tone with which upper middle-class Indians talk about their career and lifestyle — a strange sense of purpose. “We just did this because we had to. And look today. Now, we have to keep this going forward.” Her parents want her to work at Aircel, or Google, or a company like that — which has growth, opportunity, hope. And who is she to say no to that? Part of the upper middle-class experience for this generation is the endless conflict between the mind and heart, the practical and emotional. But is the practical always so easy to follow? And more importantly, is it even a real path anymore?
There are many people, friends or peers, who have tried. Those who are working for big companies and are studying for the CAT exam or the GMAT, and every day worry pokes at them, and they cannot seem to get their insides to be as practical as their outside — they are filled with emotions that range from worry to everything else, a maddening sound in their heads. They often have no clarity, not the clarity or purpose one could expect from kids who supposedly know what they are doing. When asked, they often claim that they have no answers, no more solutions than anybody else. But without the joy of pursuing their passion, or the purpose their parents had with similar ‘practical’ career tracks, they are left in limbo.
Perhaps this is another symptom of the current generation: the inability to be genuinely one or the other. Western-educated, but out of place at British pubs or American bars. Dying to feel connected to home but unable to locate it on a map or in memory. Wanting to solve the problem of what to do with this life, how to create purpose, but left in between love and sense, madness and reason, “go for it” and “safe option.”
Subject choice in the eleventh and twelfth standard was based on aptitude and personality tests — although some still opted for the Science stream in order to keep options open, while some had to bend, without realising it in some cases, to parental pressure.
That brings us neatly to friend number 3, staring out at the dusty cars from Gurgaon’s sweetshop window. She wants to be a writer, or she did, until she realised it was not so easy. She did a degree in liberal arts, which often begs the question, “but why?” She studied abroad but felt a bit incomplete, and when she came back home she continued to feel incomplete because there are paths, paths you are expected to go on, to know, when you are looking for a job. Whenever she asks a family friend, or a mother’s friend or her father’s colleague for help with finding a job, “just something of a starter, in one of those fields that these humanities types work — marketing or communications or advertising or something,” there is inevitably one question they always ask. “Where do you see yourself in five years, what do you want to be doing,” they begin, “and how do you work backward and do the things that will help you get there?”
But it was impossible to tell, impossible to decide, because how could she decide whether to be a writer, a novelist, or a journalist, or somebody who used the writing itch to join advertising or marketing? What were the people who once joined those fields thinking? And was she thinking the same thing now? Did they have a plan?
There is a trend of encouraging five-year plans among recent graduates, young people looking to begin their careers. While this may come from a well-intentioned place, the idea of twenty-something people knowing where they ought to end up is laughable. Not just because the world we are living in is changing — it is — but because an entire group of people from this upper-middle-class bracket have been trained in a different way — and those of the older generation making the rules of the workplace do not understand this training, while the young people don’t know how relevant it is.
So, when this girl was told to choose a plan, she thought, shouldn’t they instead ask her what she wanted to do, what really made her happy, and work from there? Wasn’t the future a lot hazier than her heart, which was there, alive, beating, in the moment?
This training, in elite schools and colleges, has been to find your voice. The essay-based questions in the twelfth-standard English exam involved thought, not guidebooks. Subject choice in the eleventh and twelfth standard was based on aptitude, and personality tests, not what parents wanted — although some still opted for the Science stream in order to keep options open, while some had to bend, without realising it in some cases, to parental pressure.
There were career counselling workshops at school. On a certain day, these three girls in Gurgaon all gathered, along with their classmates, in a conference room with rugs on the floor at school. There were counsellors there to speak to them for an hour about the suicide of a girl who had not gotten the marks she wanted and so felt there was no option left. All this led to the feeling that “plans” were not always possible and not always advisable. Plans were what led to action without thought; plans were what led to being pushed until you could not do any more.
The world had changed for children from upper-middle-class schools, and it had changed in a way that was difficult to immediately understand or predict. So, when this girl was told to choose a plan, she thought, shouldn’t they instead ask her what she wanted to do, what really made her happy, and work from there? Wasn’t the future a lot hazier than her heart, which was there, alive, beating, in the moment? Indecision may be a modern luxury, for the rich and comfortable (there is nothing that adults who were once middle-class hate more than their children acting rich). But it comes from a place of true change; it speaks of a slow growing trend among upper-middle-class (I stress this again and again because the financially comfortable are a very, very small portion of India and of young people in India), of questioning, of searching, of worrying.
That is why in India today, there are, among this class, an increasing number of young people dropping out of college, or switching college or course, or taking gap years. There are people who took the conventional paths of pursuing the high-paying job, a business degree, and hated it. There are also people who did it and did it well, working in consulting or business, but they find themselves qualifying their decision more and more.
There are people who follow their passion and it proves lucrative; there are those who are still finding their passion. We are poised, as members of this generation trying to place itself, to make different choices when it comes to value, purpose and work. That we are thinking deeper and questioning more intensely means an inevitable confusion as conflicting ideas clash and values try to resolve themselves. We wear the memory of history, of previous generations that built us this house, and we use it to try and understand how we can live in this house today.
When people talk about the clash of modern India, it isn’t just hyperbole — it is a multi-layered problem that includes class, money, opportunity and identity. Middle-class becoming upper-class but wanting to retain the ideals of middle-class; upper-class trying to find meaning but feeling empty; and ultimately, young people of these classes trying to find out what it means to be themselves and how best to do it. Work, jobs, and “next steps” are not just items on a checklist — they are a deeply personal thing.
Perhaps that is the legacy of this generation. We can afford to exercise the power to stop and think — reflect and look ahead — and really ask what it means to be a successful professional, and what meaning work has for our lives.
Perhaps that is the legacy of this generation, though one hesitates to use blanket terms like ‘legacy’. We can afford to exercise the power to stop and think — reflect and look ahead — and really ask what it means to be a successful professional, and what meaning work has for our lives. Because ultimately that is the question that upwardly-mobile middle-classes were focussing on, before we were born. They were asking what it meant for their lives. Now, we have to find the answer.
The sun is low and burning at four at the sweetshop, and it glints off the cars’ windshields as the three girls share their thoughts, gathering it together like cards on a table. “Just tell your parents you are doing what you want,” the first girl tells the other two. “Send them pictures sometimes, tell them you’re learning a lot, you’re doing what you want to be doing. They won’t understand at first, but eventually they will.” It is this simple-yet-novel thing that most marks out the difference of this generation from the previous; it is also the key to understanding how to go forward.
