Suppose everyone who reads this column is alive and well in 2047. How old will you be? I’m positive that young cockroaches are avid readers of newspapers, so there will be some who can still light up a dance floor! But it’s a fair guess that the spectrum will lean towards silver, with even a few centenarians in the mix. Not to worry.
Carmen Herrera sold her first painting at 89. So, wishing everyone a productive life ahead! But spare a thought for those who will be India’s real protagonists. As the poet Iqbal suggested in the context of democracy, let’s count them before we weigh them. Nearly 800 million Indians under 30 right now. Another 450 million or so to be born in 20 years. A billion and a quarter. Can anyone say 2047 will not belong to them?
It’s flattening to paint real young people as the sort of abstract demographic that Niti Aayog mavens and television anchors may prefer. But here goes—our present batch of youth is a quarter of India’s current population. And they clearly have opinions. Not just about how 2047 should turn out, or 2037, nor even 2029.
They have ideas about how 2026 should turn. Not every young person is on the same side, to be clear, nor are the platforms they fashion free of political choices and calculations. What strikes me, though, is the sheer number of young men and women who are showing up.
They could have stayed online, made their points, traded abuse and moved on to the next hashtag. They could also have been at their gaming console, or been downloading a Swedish horror movie on Torrent or whatever it is that they do. The very tangible picture of actual boys and girls who have made a choice instead to come to a public venue, stand together shoulder to shoulder—that says something. There’s something in that physical act which should be neither underestimated, nor misinterpreted. It is a lurch towards cohesion, agency and participation—not anarchy. It is a lurch towards meaning. It is an abstract in the process of turning into a figurative.
It is not only happening in India. The Gen Z on the picket line is about as transcontinental as Coke and dating. As we speak, France has been ground to a halt not by presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon’s debt reduction proposal to the EU, but by high school students. In massive, chaotic nationwide protests, those who should be practising their four-hour philosophy essays for Bac are instead blockading schools and clashing with police.
Their grouse? Teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and deteriorating school conditions. You would have thought it’s a Bimaru state. Perhaps Melenchon is on to something about the how the modern state prioritises its spending. In distant Peru, in Kenya, Madagascar and Morocco, in Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia and the Philippines, young people have likewise taken to the streets in recent times. Sometimes for very different reasons, with different triggers. But you cannot miss a certain commonality. The desire to own the future.
But why would a teenager in 2026 suddenly look up from a smartphone and stare into the future? It’s simple enough. They realise that the world is run by folks who have no stake in the future. As we speak, a ‘Godzilla’ El Niño is building up in the Pacific, and 2027 may well be the worst climate year in living memory.
But this silver generation will spend all of next year in air-conditioned seminar halls, discussing ‘biodiversity offsets’—a nice word for more destruction. The older ones are still caught up, as of late 2026, in their 20th-century fetish of fighting wars for oil. The relatively younger ones? Plotting a global epidemic of data centres that will need the energy equivalent to 40 Delhis, or all of Africa. Both the war-mongers and the tech lords are thinking nuclear. Elon Musk will be 76 in 2047, and probably on Mars.
The wise old folks of past eras had another bent of mind—they were given to picturing the long sweep of history yet to come, even if it sometimes doesn’t come. The British, for instance, clearly planned the streets of Lutyens’ Delhi to be able to move the traffic around even after a century. The industrialists of that era thought to spend money on fundamental research, which bears fruit only in decades. People built institutions. The difference between ‘selfish’ and ‘selfless’ is not the point, it’s the inclination to always factor in the future. Right now, AI evangelists may not be the only ones capable of burning up the future to fuel the present.
Thus we get a global youth inherently distrustful of the elite. Who may not trust institutions merely because they are told to—and certainly not if they are told to do so blindly. It is worth watching how governments respond when young people start making a noise. The French state has used force, made arrests. Dhaka, Colombo and Kathmandu did so too. Excessively, and in vain. There is no call to equate countries.
We are not Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal or France. Those countries have their own histories and circumstances. India is too large and too diverse for any one moment to produce a single, sweeping outcome. A protest does not automatically travel to every district, language group or social class. It also has non-violence available as a political manual, even if often observed in the breach.
New Delhi has shut down New Delhi. Traffic was stopped miles before it reached those Lutyens streets today. What it won’t stop is the argument. The original slogan was ‘Go Gyanu Go’, using an affectionate pet name and implying a Voldemort-like figure, in an ironic inversion typical of Gen Z. Now that will be joined by another. Some bright young girl somewhere is coining Gen Alpha slang for ‘Why are we not being allowed to speak?’
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Santwana Bhattacharya
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