The many lives of azadi: 79 years after Independence, what does freedom mean to Gen Z?

It is: what does azadi mean to the generation shouting it now?

For Gen Z, azadi came with a soundtrack

The generations before us learnt about freedom largely through the narratives that reached them. Our parents grew up with a handful of television channels, radio, newspapers and films that came to them through a relatively narrow cultural pipeline. There was art, dissent and disagreement, of course. But access to them was limited. The narrative was often already in the room; you could agree with it, argue with it or switch it off.

Gen Z grew up differently.

We may be the first generation to have carried an entire archive of competing narratives in our pockets. Before we were old enough to understand the politics of freedom, pop culture was already teaching us to question authority, institutions and the world we had inherited.

We watched Rang De Basanti turn youthful frustration into rebellion. Yuva made politics feel personal. Lakshya tied purpose to a generation that had been told to simply find a respectable career. Aarakshan put caste and access to education into popular conversation. More recently, Homebound forced auidences to look at the inequalities that can sit underneath something as fundamental as the right to move, work, and live with dignity.

These weren’t textbooks on democracy. But they gave us characters, songs and stories through which ideas of injustice, privilege, resistance and freedom became emotionally legible.

And then came the smartphone.

We didn’t just consume stories; we could respond to them, remix them, challenge them and find thousands of people around the world doing the same. A young Indian could watch a protest in another country before watching one in their own neighbourhood. They could discover a movement, a minority’s struggle or a political idea through platforms that didn’t previously exist.

That changed what azadi could mean.

We grew up knowing the privilege of breathing in a free India, while simultaneously being exposed to the many ways in which India could still become freer.

That contradiction may be at the heart of Gen Z’s relationship with azadi.

We are not asking for Independence. We are asking what Independence should have made possible.

Perhaps that is why the word has moved so easily from protest slogans to films, songs, memes, Instagram stories and conversations about our own lives.

For us, azadi is not only something the country won. It is something we keep trying to define.

The many lives of Azadi

Azadi means different things to Gen Z. That’s the point.

Ask a Gen Z Indian what freedom means, and you are unlikely to get the same answer twice.

For one person, it is the freedom to walk away from a career their parents chose for them. For another, it is refusing the idea that marriage must happen by a certain age. It can mean choosing not to have children, moving to another city, coming out to your family, wearing what you want, questioning a religion you inherited, refusing a caste identity that was assigned to you, or simply deciding that your life does not have to be measured by how productive you are.

For someone else, azadi is much more basic.

It is the freedom to study when their family could afford to educate only one child. It is the freedom to imagine a career beyond the work their parents have done. It is the freedom to earn enough to leave home. It is the freedom to be treated with dignity at work. It is the freedom to exist without having to negotiate caste, class, gender or geography at every step.

And Gen Z is all of these people at once.

It is the student sitting in a private college, scrolling through the same Instagram feed as the person selling them a cup of tea outside its gates. It is the young professional talking about burnout and quiet quitting, and the young worker who cannot afford to quit at all. It is the person debating whether to freeze their eggs and the person who never had the luxury of imagining a life beyond survival. It is the child fighting their parents over a career choice and the child who never had the choice to begin with.

Freedom was never one-dimensional. It wasn’t 25 years ago, and it certainly isn’t now.

What has changed is our ability to see those different versions of it sitting next to each other.

A generation raised on the internet has grown accustomed to encountering lives it would otherwise never have known existed. We know that the person asking for freedom from parental expectations may be standing beside someone asking for the freedom to have parents who can afford to educate them. That someone fighting for gender equality may be fighting a very different battle from someone fighting caste discrimination. That the freedom to log off from a toxic workplace is a privilege when someone else is working three jobs just to keep a family afloat.

Gen Z’s shared language of azadi, then, does not come from having a shared struggle.

It comes from recognising each other’s struggles.

We may be divided by class, caste, geography, politics and privilege. But somewhere between a protest chant, a film song, a viral post and a conversation between two strangers, we have arrived at a deceptively simple idea:

Your fight for freedom does not have to look like mine for me to understand why you are fighting.

And sometimes, azadi isn’t a fight at all.

It is the quiet belief that tomorrow can be better than today.

That may be the thread connecting all the different versions of freedom we carry. The India we want to be free in is not just an India free from something. It is an India free to become something — more equal, more forgiving, more curious, more just, more willing to make room for lives that don’t look like ours.

Every Independence Day, we return to the same old question: what did we become free from in 1947?

Perhaps Gen Z is asking a slightly different one: what are we free to become now?

The answer will never be the same for everyone. And perhaps it shouldn’t be.