Young people today are having a tough time. They have a plethora of options at their disposal and 24X7 connectivity with the world but this is leading to increased anxiety, lack of attention, lack of clarity of purpose, and highly internalised competition masked under an ‘I-don’t-care’ attitude.
It doesn’t help that adults, who are themselves struggling to deal with the accelerated pace of change in the world, often just dismiss the youth as being lazy, entitled, and by-and-large beyond redemption.
Lakhs of young people are joining the workforce every year and yet employability is on the decline, there are hundreds of failed start-ups for each successful one, and the problems of the world are where they were. Blaming young people for this cross-board failure is akin to victim-shaming and no more than an excuse to deflect responsibility and self-reflection on the part of educational institutions.
Given the right support, encouragement, and hands-on challenges, young people not only demonstrate their vast ambition and potential, but are also open to getting their hands dirty, listening, failing, learning, rethinking, and innovating – all the qualities that they are dismissed for not possessing and the exact qualities that are needed for India to lay down a lowest common dominator for the dignity of all life.
Case in point, a group of five Anant Fellows – students from diverse backgrounds such as engineering, architecture, design – set out to tackle the problem of garbage disposal head-on through their live action project.
With a lofty (and arguably unrealistic) ambition of turning Bopal-Ghuma (Ahmedabad) into a zero-landfill zone, they engaged extensively with the residents, Bopal-Ghuma Nagarpalika authorities, waste collection truck-drivers, as well as rag-pickers who work (and live) at the landfill.
These conversations, on the one hand, made them realise that they would need to substantially trim down their scope and, on the other, made evident the need for clearly defined interventions at two levels: producing behavioural change in relation to waste disposal, and making visible the everyday vulnerabilities that rag-picking women are subject to because of our callousness in disposing our waste.
To achieve the two objectives, they are conducting workshops on composting and waste segregation in conjunction with BGN officials across housing colonies in Bopal, while also producing a participatory film along with the rag picking women, which they plan to screen at multiple locations including DPS Bopal.
Will these interventions change practices enough to actually lead to a zero-landfill site anytime soon? Most likely not. But the hope is that at the very least, this process will leave an impact on the five young people who have developed a vocabulary, found the tools to meaningfully engage with their surroundings, and discovered themselves in the process.
The hope is that after tasting blood through a hands-on project dealing with wicked problems in our country, any job that does not make a positive difference to the world will be meaningless for them and that precisely through the power and passion of our ‘lost’ youth, the world will transform into a more equitable, and habitable place.
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