Young, free, and loved

Illustration/Uday Mohite

August 12 was International Youth Day, a day to discuss India's much touted demographic dividend.

Earlier, Ashok Sopan Dhole, who taught Hindi at Symbiosis College for 18 years, was suspended because a student put out a video of his lecture where he discusses different deities. This brought in the ABVP hurt sentiment brigade. Some students also gave a statement of their offence - whether voluntary, coerced, or simply herd mentality, who knows.

The mental health organisation Mindpeers released findings of a study which revealed that 70 per cent of 72,000 plus youth they surveyed were highly stressed. Anxieties revolved around money, fading friendships, ageing parents and poor self-worth, making work and connection, both difficult.

Older people might feel a little more stable in some respects. But they too, experience the deep loneliness that has set into society where building community and keeping connection is harder for multiple reasons, economic, cultural and political.

The Symbiosis incident emphasises how our political context makes connection a difficult habit to learn however. All of life has become a competition of distrust, a bullies debate. The purpose of interaction is to trip others up in order to feel powerful, never giving in to the vulnerability of trust. We will not even argue our points in a classroom, but merely use video and social media to bring out the bullies. This is the primary idea of power provided by the dominant political culture today - which pervades social media critique of all colours. Denouncement is the inevitable denouement.

The youth who bully a teacher, might imagine themselves powerful for a minute. But they also exist within this same culture of suspicion, scrutiny and judgement they are carrying out and the miasma of dread it creates.

When politically and digitally, meanings are pre-decided, the possibility of connection is foreclosed. Political disagreement cannot be passionately argued, because even that is a form of connecting to another's thinking and ideas. There can only be instantaneous decision and division. What then is the possibility of finding meaning, of moving through connections and disconnections, to an understanding of oneself and others? Without it connections become instrumental, meant to staunch fear, not build communities. That young people worry so much about money has something to do with the economy - but also something to do with the idea that we have no worth, but what we earn, and no other kind of resources to sustain us.

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Ideas of self-care and boundaries serve a purpose, but also hover uneasily close to the idea of political denouncement. To see others as a threat and seal oneself off often becomes a default choice. To say ‘this is not working for me' is quick and hermetic; moving with the unknown - in love, work or friendship - vulnerable and slow. Rejection becomes our idiom.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com