Indian Millennials: The Dreamers

This article was written in 2018

The dreams of a generation are a reflection of their reality, the ground zero from which they wish to take off. For the millennial generation, ground zero looks pretty damn good — full of possibilities to seize. Everything seems to be working in their favour, from having the world at their fingertips to opportunities in their laps. One can’t help but wonder then, what are their dreams like — how big a leap are they taking from reality and how far can they really go before something snaps?

Dreams are served on a platter these days — in photos and videos and boomerangs. In a matter of seconds, millennials consume other people’s dreams, some realized and some WIP, some award-worthy and some weekend creations. Slowly but surely, dreaming has become second nature, and the people who realise it are sure to remind the rest of the world of their achievement.

The dreams of the millennial generation come from a pressing doubt in the reality they are in. The doubt is born out of the friction between two opposing forces, namely, parental or societal knowledge and the millennial’s knowledge of opportunities and the pressure to sieze them. While one side thinks it knows the world and therefore how to best live in it, the other experiences the world as entirely different from what they were prepared for by formal education and traditional values.

Often, the said friction becomes too potent to deal with, leading to a burning desire to escape. There is enough fuel and tools available for millennials to propel themselves out of their current reality and find a better destination that they can be in control of. In the pursuit of this destination, millennials wander far away from home, literally and figuratively. They learn new ways of living, interacting with the world and expressing themselves, and in time, this set of values and practices becomes the dominant reality that is often at odds with their past.

What we commonly call a generation gap is made far more potent in India because the millennials have taken leaps so big, it has pushed them into a cultural isolation of sorts — they inhabit a world only they are capable of decoding and making the best of — hence seemingly living an alternate reality. For example, the reality of a single, independent working woman is vastly different from her mother’s experience at the same life stage, and the experience of a young content creator is nowhere close to her/his father’s government job.

In either case, the “elders” are just not equipped to pass on wisdom that would help their children realize their dreams. The tools to navigate life are available in the form of educational opportunities, new career paths, social networks, internet technology and more — but it is up to the millennials to learn how to use the tools and find meaning through them. The tools used earlier — hard work, family and community networks, government jobs, IT jobs — are impotent if not irrelevant.

In such a scenario, new role models have cropped up. They tend to belong to alternate belief systems, are self-starters that challenge the traditional way of living life and create new benchmarks of success. A familiar example would be All India Bakchod, who started out doing comedy but have gradually created culture that represents as well as influences gen Y. It’s another matter that having a role model with that name would be preposterous 10 years ago but more significantly, having a group of people questioning the status quo on everything from Bollywood to politics is a roaring flag for alternative benchmarks of success.

A similar shift in role models is reflected in the portrayal of heroes in mainstream cinema and content in general. There is now the female protagonist-hero, who not only drives the story but overcomes obstacles relatable to millennial women in general. This is to say that her story is not dictated by a larger narrative centered around someone else, it is rich in her experiences. In a dramatic turn of events, the mysterious and cliché-ridden lives of ordinary women are unravelling through stories written by them.

Upon closer examination though, the experiences of millennial women represent the complexity arising from the emergence of individuality in a culture that thrives on co-dependence and places the value of family over an individual. Given that women have been central to the existence of familial structures, it is imperative for them to choose to dream and venture out in search of a system where they enjoy more agency.

And unsurprisingly, a lot many women are making that choice — the most palpable manifestation of which is the emerging population of single women. In the millennial generation, the single woman is not an aberration, she is among 12% of the female population — the largest ever number of women who have never been married, divorced, separated or widowed in the history of the country.

Theoretically, it’s a giant leap for dreams in our culture — or what one can dream of becoming. But lived reality suggests that the opening up of new possibilities comes with turmoil and chaos. One of the commonly felt pressures is to have the best of both worlds — the traditional and modern, the old and the new. The other is a sense of being uprooted from all that was known and familiar, and navigating world on one’s own. The third and perhaps the most poignant one is the strain of rejecting what was once held sacrosanct, of straying from the expectations of a patriarchal culture and taking complete responsibility for it.

Personal responsibility is the non-identical twin of freedom, and the millennial generation is just starting to realise that. To have more opportunities and life choices than any generation before them is also to constantly face the question: What will I make of it? While women start many steps behind men, both genders face the challenge of discovering and navigating new perspectives, beliefs and benchmarks.

Identities are in flux, shaping up as people undergo trial and error, navigate tentative dreams and witness a new dream turning to reality every day on social media. To have a definitive and distinctive sense of identity seems to be more aspirational than owning a car and a bungalow. It is an aspiration not easily fulfilled, leaving the millennials on a path of exploration along a road wide open with possibilities. Once on the road, it is up to the millennial to find the right opportunity, use it to her advantage, and be satisfied enough with the destination that she doesn’t start the process all over again.

This article is the first of three in the series titled ‘Indian Millennials.