Back in his hostel room after a long day at college in Pune, Hrishit Bhattacharya, 20, is acutely aware of the gloom-and-doom talk surrounding AI’s impact on the workplace. If Gen Y stepped out of high school into a whirlwind of opportunities created by a liberalised India in the 1990s, Hrishit is staring at a job market that feels grim, as companies obsess over staying lean.
“Instagram and Facebook, woh toh hota rehta hai. LinkedIn is where I’m spending more time — trying to connect with people who can help me professionally,” says Hrishit, who is nearing the end of his college days. He stays glued to sports news, happy to plough through a barrage of sports-related pings on his smartphone.
A young Calcutta DJ who doesn’t want to be named prefers to be on Reddit, even if it is only to be updated on what people are talking about. Unlike Discord, which is the preferred platform for Gen Z in the US to vent online, Reddit is the platform of choice in India. Discord began as a gamers’ haven before finding mainstream audiences during the pandemic. Teenagers are increasingly gravitating towards the platform, helped by the fact that many on the wrong side of 30 barely know it exists. This is where 28-year-old Max Verstappen commands more attention than Shah Rukh Khan, and where 23-year-old Goa-born Jonathan Amaral’s exploits in Battlegrounds Mobile India are discussed alongside the chess brilliance of Magnus Carlsen, D. Gukesh and R. Praggnanandhaa. It isn’t a feed-driven social network; it’s still somewhat a space for conversation.
Some of the trending Reddit “communities” in India, as the chatrooms are called, are — BollyBlindsNGossip, India, AskIndianMen, CATpreparation with 1.5M, 969K, 282K and 210K weekly visitors, respectively. The community called India discusses politics. A lot of users post links of news reports and then what follows is a needle-pulling thread of commentary. Then there are individual comments that also trigger conversations. Sample these subject lines: “Indian families have a talent for ruining every vacation by turning it into a temple marathon” or “Came back to India after 2 years and wt has BJP achieved in the past decade (sic)” or “ground report: what actually happened on Messi’s Calcutta GOAT tour (sic)”. The comments are wide-ranging and frank, unlike anything you are likely to come across amongst complete strangers at cha addas or cafes.
Our DJ, though, uses Reddit only to listen in. She says, “I don’t talk there, I only stalk. The problem with putting anything personal on social media is that whatever you say, people jump on you. Everything on Instagram also is judged. And Facebook is for seeing what my mother is doing.”
“Either you say nothing, or you rant. And when you rant, you put yourself at risk,” says Varun Desai, a Calcutta-based musician who is in his early 40s. Desai was once part of the crowd that introduced Calcutta to techno and house music.
Desai understands why Hrishit and the DJ are so obsessed with invisibility and privacy, unlike the earlier generation. Desai says, “With social media, there’s always a camera. There’s a movement to avoid places where a camera is constantly in your face. Young people are looking for narratives they can control, even if only to a small extent.”