 If you're in your early 20s in India, it's likely that there are three things that you want to do. The first is that you want to go to college and get a higher degree. The second, that you want to start a job or start something on your own. And the third, which only happens to young women, is that your parents convince you that it is time for you to get married. There are roughly about 140 million such people in the age bracket of 20 to 24 in India. And out of those, about 54 million want work. They either are actively seeking work or they will do it if they get it. But out of these, how many do you think actually got work in 2021-22? All the numbers that I'm giving you are data from CMI, the Center for Monitoring India's Economy because the government doesn't give out detailed data. As I told you, 54 million young people within the age bracket of 20 to 24 years wanted to work. Out of these, only 28 million have got work, which means about half of them are unemployed. An overwhelming majority of this are young men. And 35 to 40% of these young unemployed men come from lower middle class backgrounds where the family income, not individual income, the total family income is between 8 to 17,000 rupees a month. Now think of what it is like to be a young person, usually a young male living in such a family. To be reminded almost every day that it's time for them to share the financial responsibilities of the family. Help the father out. I'm saying father because in India women's participation in the labour force is just about 10%. Relatives tell these young men that how long are you going to study? How many degrees are you going to get? Your father used to earn enough at your age to run a family. Think of the frustration, the humiliation of mailing resumes to many companies appearing for exams, for government jobs, sending direct messages on LinkedIn and Twitter to company HR executives and getting nothing in response. And then think of the hopes rising when they get an interview call and then those hopes getting dashed when nothing comes out of it. Along with all of this, there's the pressure of getting married. Relatives coming home tell these young men that it's time for you to get a young wife home to help out your mother in the kitchen and to run the home. But who will marry an unemployed young man? Young women in this age bracket have to negotiate an entirely different hell. If they've been to college, they're told to stop dreaming of higher studies. They're told how long are you going to study? Ultimately, you don't have to work. You have to look after babies and your husband's family. Those who come from families which are able to defy these social norms find very quickly that it is almost impossible for women to get jobs. 37% of urban women do not have jobs and these are women who want to work. And remember, only one out of 10 women actually participate in the labour force. They have no hope of getting work so they don't even look for it. And these are numbers for all women. For young women, this number is likely to be closer to two thirds or even three fourths. So quite often women are married off to young men even if they don't have jobs as long as their family has some property or some agricultural land. This is because an unemployed young man comes at a discounted dowry rate. Their parents are willing to get them married without taking too much dowry. Then the young couple end up living in their parental home because they don't have enough money to start a home of their own. By the time a young man reaches his late 20s, he's willing to take any job that he can get because there's pressure now to start a family of his own to have a baby. And by the early 30s, he settles into the grind of drudgery, a dreary job in which he has no interest and for which he has absolutely no passion. And if the young wife had any hope of going out to work one day, those hopes are dashed pretty soon because there's a child to look after and old in-laws to look after. And also because of the low income that these families have, they cannot afford to keep domestic help or a nanny. The women realize very quickly that the money or salary they're likely to get from a job is not good enough for them to hire domestic help. It's just not worth their while. In lower middle-class, upper-caste Hindu households, young men are taking up jobs in service sectors with great reluctance. Jobs like fixing cable TV, repairing air conditioners, servicing broadband connections. These are kind of jobs which their fathers did not take. It is more likely that in these upper-caste Hindu homes, fathers got jobs as lower-division clerks in government offices or as babus in small private sector companies or as government school teachers and often their income in urban areas was augmented by a flow of income coming from their farm holdings. But those jobs are gone now and the young have to fend for themselves. And instead of agitating for jobs, they start blaming reservations. These were jobs which automatically went to the upper-caste Hindu males usually now after reservations. There is a tough competition there coming from those from OBC and Dalit families. And for the first time, they also come face-to-face with young people from Muslim families in the domain of earning a living. That is because Muslims are over-represented in the domain of self-employment, especially small low-paying jobs. This has happened since right from independence, Muslims have found it very difficult to get regular salary jobs, whether it be in the government or in the private sector. So, they turn to self-employment very early. Muslims therefore have a disproportionate presence in occupations like house painting, driving, fixing cars, repairing bikes. And that is one of the reasons why they are abused as puncture wallas. In tailoring, in carpentry, in metal works, all these places, young Hindu men who would have otherwise got salary jobs, are having to contend with competition from Muslim youth. Now, this could have resulted in a unified protest against India's economic policies, which causes such high levels of unemployment. But that has not happened thanks to the way in which India's dominant ideologies have developed. Public discourse has developed over the past 30 years, where self-employment, profiteering, market forces have been worshipped and promoted. Young unemployed men today love big corporates, the hero worship them. They are great votaries of the free market and hate anything to do with government and public sector. Thanks to news media and social media, they've been trained to believe that their problems are all because of the English-speaking, erstwhile elite, the bureaucratic aristocracy which ruled India till the early 1990s. The youth of today have been trained to believe that Nehruvian socialism, secularism, liberalism are to blame for their current wars. These views are amplified by social media, by mainstream media, by economists, by big corporates and by politicians. Their lack of opportunities, absence of jobs is converted into a politics of grievance, anger and hatred towards those who they think have taken their jobs. The Dalits, the OBCs, the Muslims and youth politics chooses hatred over a demand for jobs.