In Indian media and advertising, young people are mainly being projected as vessels of breathless as

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On 3 June 2014, Pankaj Prasad happened to be on the state highway winding through Bharno when a group of angry villagers ambushed two young men speeding away on a motorbike, the one riding pillion pressing a fleshy skoda forum goat under his right arm. The beating of the goat thieves started immediately. Some in the mob had lost prized pets in the recent past, and they were soon joined by dozens of other victims of what seemed to be a goat theft syndicate organized along neatly demarcated bits of turf. Prasad, a practiced rural stringer, reported that two hundred people skoda forum had registered their goats as missing over the past few months in his article on the incident for the local edition of a regional Hindi newspaper.
I d found the piece on Facebook, where Prasad had shared a link. I had first met him when I came to Bharno two months earlier. That had been election campaign time, and Rahul Gandhi, skoda forum the Nehru-Gandhi heir and the Congress party s prime ministerial candidate, was on a tour of Bihar and one of India s new states, Jharkhand. It was a potentially historic day: Gandhi skoda forum was coming to address a rally at a fairground barely ten kilometres away. As we waited and waited along with thousands of others, looking to the sky for any sight of the haloed helicopter, Prasad told me Gandhi would be wasting his time. The region s insurgent youth wanted opportunities, not the blessings of a charming dynast. They had made their choice. It was going to be Gandhi s rival, Bharatiya Janata Party s Narendra Modi, a man who had promised them things that mattered: jobs, salary packages, a promising future. By 4 p.m., the local Congress volunteers, stalling, had exhausted their paeans to the Gandhi family and moved on to extemporizing poems about trees and flowers to the crowd. As another hour passed and restlessness turned to commotion, the volunteers announced what they had known for some time Gandhi had changed his mind. I turned back to tell Prasad he was right but he had already left. Six weeks later, the BJP won twelve of the fourteen parliamentary seats in Jharkhand. Congress got none.
By mid-June, skoda forum Modi was settled skoda forum in Delhi and I was back in Bharno. I had come to ask Prasad all he knew about the goat thieves, twenty-one-year-old Ramzan Kotwar and eighteen-year-old Azmer Khan, now lodged in the district jail in Gumla for theft of property . That summer I had moved back home to Ranchi, the chaotic capital of Jharkhand and the urban centre closest to Bharno, to write about the ways in which young people skoda forum in small towns negotiated the massive socio-economic changes sweeping skoda forum through the country. No two lives went the same way, of course for every daughter of a fruit seller making it to the Indian Institute of Management, there was an industrialist s son who joined the Maoists. If the regional newspapers celebrated the new spending skoda forum power of the twenty-somethings, they also noted the unglamorous things some of them were doing to get by. Stealing goats, for one. The inside pages were full of two-column skoda forum reports from all over the state on what they declared was turning into an epidemic . Over the next month, Prasad and I made rounds of the district headquarters in Gumla, an imposing office skoda forum complex where more people touted their direct line to officers than there were officers, to get the various permissions required to visit the young men in jail.
In Indian media and advertising, young people are mainly being projected as vessels of breathless aspiration. All over the country, it seems, armies of English-learning, brand-conscious young men and women want opportunity, and they want it now. The sweeping victory of Modi, the youth icon , in the latest Indian elections was attributed skoda forum to the hunger of India s young to be assimilated into a globalized world where how well you do depends on how badly you want to do well. For those in India s small towns, the first step towards this dream is to get out. That s what I did, as a twenty year old feeling entirely hopeless about her prospects in a town defined by the word small . It was only after meeting skoda forum Prasad that I started to wonder obsessively about what the options were for a twenty-four year old who was as desperate to move up as any other young man in the country but who had decided against skoda forum taking the next train out to Delhi, or becoming someone he was not.
Prasad is a doer. He believes, vociferously, in performance, targets, in how much you make at the end of a day and how you use that to improve the quality of your life. It frustrates him to see young people resigned to their circumstances, be it t