6 min learnUp to date: Jun 27, 2026 09:18 PM IST
I should have been in Class Three when a instructor first confirmed us an image of the constellations. The white dots appeared scattered throughout the two-page unfold of a navy-blue sky till the instructor had joined a number of with neat traces and declared they fashioned a bear, a hunter, a plough. The category was delighted. Then somebody requested, in utter confusion, the place the road really was and why that they had by no means seen it earlier than.
The instructor smiled. The traces, she mentioned, had been our creativeness.
Just a few years in the past, in a hamlet tucked into the Himalayan foothills, I spent a night speaking to a gaggle of younger women. Their mornings started earlier than dawn. They fetched water, gathered fodder, ready meals, and moved by way of a rhythm of life that had barely modified throughout generations. At one level, I requested in the event that they knew about among the web slang that now seems in each interview section about “in the present day’s youth.” They regarded puzzled. One lady, with some entry to a cellphone, thought for a second earlier than saying quite meekly, “That may be a totally different kind of world. It’s town individuals’s world.”
A cursory look on the web tabloids, and one would discover numerous articles on daily basis explaining what Gen Z needs, how Gen Z dates, why Gen Z quits jobs, analysing the minutest crevices of the lifetime of “in the present day’s youth”. But the younger individual being described is nearly at all times the identical. She normally has an city orientation, is chronically on-line and digitally savvy, is cushioned by disposable earnings and probably speaks in a newly devised social media grammar that incites each intrigue and disgust. What concerning the shepherd beneath a Himalayan glacier, the lady in a distant Odisha village supporting her household, the unemployed younger man in a Delhi slum? They had been all born after 1997 too. Are they Gen Z too? Or has the label quietly stopped together with them?
The making of a era
Relatively than being an inevitable sociological class, “Gen Z” emerged from American market analysis. Promoting companies wanted a handy label for the cohort that adopted Millennials, one that might section audiences and forecast buying habits. The label was then adopted far past the world of promoting, steadily buying the authority of frequent sense. This echoes thinker Ian Hacking’s thought of “making up individuals”: classifications don’t merely describe individuals; they will form how individuals come to know themselves. The purpose isn’t that Gen Z is fictional, however that the boundaries of the class are drawn by individuals, and are subsequently by no means impartial.
Like many imported concepts, “Gen Z” travelled effectively and arrived in a deeply divided and stratified society like India. The intrigue and brouhaha round their seemingly distinctive behaviour adopted swimsuit. However the assumption beneath most conversations about Gen Z—{that a} era shares broadly related experiences—begins to unravel in India.
Who will get counted as Gen Z? The reply usually relies upon much less on start 12 months than on whose experiences change into seen.
Among the many most typical observations about Gen Z in India is that they’re chronically on-line. However how true is that in a rustic the place rural web penetration stands at a meagre 41.72%, in opposition to an city price exceeding 110%? A label constructed round digital nativeness excludes hundreds of thousands of younger rural Indians earlier than it has even framed its first query.
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Language sharpens that divide additional nonetheless. The younger Indian on the centre of each pattern piece is nearly invariably an English-language speaker, a demographic that constitutes barely 10 to 12 p.c of the nation. More and more, this slender slice comes to face in for the entire.
Caste additional compounds this phenomenon. Traditionally marginalized communities just like the SC, ST, and OBC collectively make up roughly 75% of India’s inhabitants, the overwhelming majority of whom don’t have any presence within the media ecosystems the place Gen Z stereotypes are manufactured and circulated.
The “lazy, entitled” Gen Z being complained about by CEOs on LinkedIn represents a skinny city, privileged sliver. For them, the luxurious of being perceived as disengaged is itself a category privilege. Everybody else is simply too busy working to make it into the discourse in any respect.
Can India have one era?
Practically a century in the past, Karl Mannheim argued in his 1928 essay The Drawback of Generations that generations aren’t merely teams of individuals born across the similar time however teams formed by frequent historic experiences. That concept sits uneasily in India. The nation’s under-25 inhabitants, greater than 600 million individuals, doesn’t encounter historical past from something resembling the identical beginning line. The NFHS-6 reveals that greater than one-third of ladies aged 20-24 had been married earlier than the age of 18 in West Bengal. The determine drops to round 2% in Kerala. These are the timelines structuring hundreds of thousands of younger Indian lives, timelines during which hole years, Instagram reels, and acutely aware consumerism belong to a wholly totally different universe of chance.
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What separates these younger individuals isn’t merely style or tradition, however alternative itself. As Amartya Sen argued, what issues isn’t merely what individuals choose however what they’re genuinely free to do. The space between two younger Indians usually begins lengthy earlier than both of them downloads Instagram.
The result’s a biased suggestions loop. When opinion-influencers, policymakers, manufacturers and media go searching for “the youth,” they discover exactly the younger individual their devices had been designed to search out. She turns into the face of a era not as a result of she represents the bulk, however as a result of she is essentially the most legible. A form is drawn, many times, from the identical vantage level. Everybody past its edges slowly turns into tougher to see.
The celebrities had been at all times there. The traces had been ours.
Maybe that’s the query value asking every time we invoke Gen Z in India: are we discovering a constellation, or are we drawing one? And as we admire the peculiarities of the form, which stars have we stopped altogether?
The article is co-authored by Vagmi Joshi (Growth practitioner, printed author and creator of the ebook ‘Babaal Talai) and Charu Pawar (Growth practitioner, Girl Shri Ram School for Ladies alumna)
