Kiran Gowda, a final-year MBA student at a private university in north Bengaluru, is over the moon. He just bagged a ₹10 lakh per annum pre-placement offer in a consumer goods company.
Kiran is the designated chief experience officer of his batch. He takes guests around the college campus. As he walks me through it with two other batchmates, they talk about their life — project work, research papers, hackathons and AI-driven curriculum. “We stay put in the college 12-14 hours, five days a week,” says Kiran. “On weekends, we chill, pub crawl in Indiranagar or Church Street.”
Indiranagar is about 6 kilometres from the university. It is a Friday evening. Four young men and women are playing table football just outside a microbrewery and pub. There are food trucks, shawarma stalls and dessert cafes all around. A 60-something tea and coffee stall owner says, “Dance and music in the pubs continue till early morning.” The Namma Metro rumbles overhead in agreement.
Shreya Nitin, a law student, stays in a PG in SG Palya, a hub of student hostels, in south Bengaluru. She says, “Life is not easy here.” She arrived last year from Chennai because there are more job and internship opportunities in Bengaluru.
Not very far from SG Palya is Koramangala, a major centre for small IT companies and startups. BITS Pilani graduate Akshay T., 26, is founder of an infotech startup here. He spends 18 hours at work every day. If his workday sounds stretched, his idea of that much-awaited break is nothing like the Millennials ever dared dream. He says, “I dream of chilling out in an island resort during summer recess next year.”
Many like Akshay use “collaborative living and working spaces” where many techies live together for short periods and focus on building tech projects.
Youth from all over India flock to Bengaluru, believing it to be some utopia. Trilochan Sastry — a professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B), and founder of the Association of Democratic Reform, an NGO that works on electoral and political reforms — has seen the city grow. He says, “It’s a melting pot for those who arrive in hordes from the east, the Northeast and the rest of south India. After they settle down, they realise this is not the India of their dreams.” They discover traffic gridlocks from hell and potholed roads. He continues, “These people are under enormous stress to survive.”
So caught up are they that they don’t seem to have time to pause. Most of the young people I spoke to said they have never voted. Most of those from other states said they don’t feel the urge to go all the way home “just to cast a vote”. And those who are local voters said their votes “won’t make any difference to the political mess”.
A majority of the younger lot — between 16 and 18 — nurtures an aspiration to leave the country for higher education and eventually settle abroad.
Navin Vishesh, 27, had arrived in the city as an undergraduate student from Chennai. He did his MBA here and even landed a
job in a fintech company. Navin’s father, a government clerk, had difficulty funding his son’s education and living expenses in Bengaluru. Today, Navin is back in Chennai — he suffered a meltdown after being fired. Not that such stories deter others. His friend Pradip Gomes, 27, an advertising professional from Chennai, has arrived in Bengaluru. He works in an agency in Koramangala. While we chat he says, “Here, no one is bothered about the state of democracy in India. We have confined ourselves to issues like the menace of stray dogs.”
That the students are scared to join or discuss anything remotely related to protests or politics becomes evident when the topic comes up for discussion at a tea shop outside a private university in northern Bengaluru. Students leave the table when asked about their political views.
The state government also discourages youth politics. Since the 1980s, there has been a ban on student elections across Karnataka.
Church Street in central Bengaluru is perhaps the liveliest walk. The Metro Rail has made the area rather accessible. It is on Church Street that I meet Hamra Anasuya, who is an undergraduate student. She’s with her classmates Shraddha Shibu and Liya Mariyam. We sit down in a cafe and they order filter coffee. A lot of young people said they preferred creative drinks with local flavours (kokum, jamun) and “functional” ingredients (protein-infused) over alcohol. The three women live with their parents in Bengaluru. When I ask if politics plays any role in their lives, Hamra says, “Religion and politics have mixed in India creating a dangerous concoction.” Not what I was looking for, but it is something.
Shraddha adds that most of her friends, especially those from the privileged section, never engage in political discussions. Shibu adds, “Politicians in India skillfully alienate the youth
from politics.”
Ninety per cent of corporate employees under the age of 25 in Karnataka are struggling with anxiety issues, says Suhas Adiga, 26, general secretary of Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union. Sarovar Benkikere, 27, is the president of Karnataka Vidyarthi Sanghatane (KVS), a student rights group.
Among other things, KVS fights for social security for contract workers. Benkikere points out that not all youth are indifferent to politics, many are scared of the “P” word. He says, “Even though we are a non-political organisation, students are afraid to enrol.”
Prof. Sandeep Shashtri is a political scientist and pro vice-chancellor at Jain University. He helped the Karnataka government draft a policy on youth affairs 10 years ago; it was based on a state-wide survey of what the youth wanted.
He believes this is an aspirational generation, bogged down by academics and career. He says, “They have access to enormous amounts of information on global developments in a connected world, but they don’t have the time to analyse.”