Young India’s Technicolour Dreams

The protagonists vary: like Vinay Singhal, the man from Haryana who runs a website, Wittyfeed, from Indore. The site is a ‘content farm’, and is currently valued at $30 million dollars. I hadn’t heard of it before I read the book, but it is one of the most popular websites operating out of India, which focuses solely on creating viral content for Western users. The kids — and they are literally kids who work there — produce content which is lapped up by the audiences in the United States. Such as ‘Kylie Jenner lip challenge’ or ‘How to get lips like Kylie Jenner without going under the knife’, a lip-sync battle between Dwayne Johnson and Taylor Swift, and stories about Donald Trump. But what makes this start-up different is the village culture of the place, with the Silicon Valley mumbo-jumbo thrown in. Singhal, who is inspired by Modi (“A good leader is half democratic, half dictatorial”), is big on “Indian values” (“Partying is fine but with the family”). He swears by his belief that “if you let Indian values guide you, you can beat any competition in the West”, and he thinks that running a successful company makes him the most suitable candidate for running the country.

At a Kolkata eating joint, popular with the youngsters. (Prabal Mandal)

From a young aspiring model who is struggling to an unschooled young man from a Jharkhand village becoming an acclaimed spoken English teacher, the stories of the other protagonists are inspiring and heart-breaking in parts: there’s a village fixer who has made a lot of money, a violent ‘gau rakshak’ (part of a criminal cow vigilante group protected by the state) in Haryana, a BJP social media worker in Ranchi, and a BPO scamster in Delhi. Each of their stories are distinct but not really different. It is a generation of people with the socio-cultural mores of their forefathers — about women, marriage and social order — but, with ambitions straight out of an American comic-book: of quick riches, power and high fame. Of the few of them who have political interest, they are Modi supporters. But, the disillusionment born out of frustrated hopes — and the gap between reality and dreams — seems to be setting in now.

The story of the lone female protagonist in the book, Richa Singh, former president of Allahabad University Students Union, is both distinct and different. The author finds an inspirational connect with her politics and becomes an integral part of her

dramatic journey (like being on stage when bombs are thrown at her by rivals) towards challenging the male-dominated student politics of Uttar Pradesh. It is a rather uncritical view, with no questioning of her political choices. Richa lost the last UP assembly election as a Samajwadi Party candidate. It is telling that the man she stopped from entering the University for his rabid Hindutva views, Yogi Adityanath, became the chief minister of UP after those elections.

An engaging read with vivid details, the book stands out as a collection of good reportage. Even while asserting her politics, Poonam doesn’t pass judgement on the characters: her attempts at understanding them never crosses over to rationalising their behaviour. While each of these are fascinating stories, do they really represent the whole of neo-middle class, or this generation of Indians? The lack of any Dalit story or a story from South India or the Northeast in the book is jarring, as is the peaking of the book in its first two chapters. But those are minor aberrations in an effort that succeeds in training the spotlight on one of the relatively unlit corners of contemporary India.