Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World

By Snigdha Poonam

What do India’s millennials want and how are they transforming one of the youngest, most populous nations in the world?

More than half of India is under the age of twenty-five, but India’s millennials are nothing like their counterparts in the West. In a country that is increasingly characterized by ambition and crushing limitations, this is a generation that cannot—and will not—be defined on anything but their own terms. They are wealth-chasers, hucksters, and fame-hunters, desperate to escape their narrow prospects. They are the dreamers.

Award-winning journalist Snigdha Poonam traveled through the small towns of northern India to investigate the phenomenon that is India’s Generation Y. From dubious entrepreneurs to political aspirants, from starstruck strivers to masterly swindlers, these are the clickbaiters who create viral content for Facebook and the internet scammers who stalk you at home, but they are also defiant student union leaders determined to transform campus life. Poonam made her way—on carts and buses, in cars and trucks—through India’s badlands to uncover a theater of toxic masculinity, a spirited brew of ambition, and a hunger for change that is bound to drive the future of the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Aug 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780674988781

Book preview

References

PART I: ‘There Is No Plan B’

1

The Click-Baiter

IT MIGHT BE any other editorial meeting, in any of a million new clickbait start-ups: a set of editors huddled around a table to discuss what news and gossip to feed their audience next. The process is quick and brutal. Ideas are thrown around like bids on a trading floor:

Why your best friend is your true love, just like Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher.

This is what you need to know about Amanda—Justin Bieber’s new girlfriend.

How your face would look if you survived a car crash.

Fifteen times Donald Trump was trolled hilariously.

Fifteen minutes is all it takes the team to go over the whole range of American obsessions, from Kardashians to belly fat, from sex confessions to life hacks; and fifteen seconds is the average time they spend making a decision. Poor Amanda is peremptorily ditched for Victoria Beckham, who has just kicked up a parenting scandal by posting a photo on Instagram in which she is kissing one of her children. The editors opt for a bold stand, and argue the former Spice Girl did nothing wrong. Or, as the published article will later put it, ‘This is why kissing your kids on the lips is not a bad idea.’ They have a reason for choosing the story: ‘Child kissing is trending in the US,’ a young woman wearing black eyeshadow informs the room. The car crash idea is tweaked to imagine the impact of two car crashes on someone’s face at once. Everyone agrees it should only be a visual story. Americans, apparently, simply adore accident horror. Kim Kardashian loses out to Kylie Jenner. Another enterprising young woman volunteers a DIY experiment as research for the story ‘How to get lips like Kylie Jenner without going under the knife’. (‘Kylie Jenner lip challenge’ is also, apparently, trending.) No changes to the last item—Donald Trump is, of course, always hot. Ideas are approved not because of their news value but on account of how they appeal to base emotions. And in this quarter of an hour, these ten youngsters have tapped into the whole range of American emotional triggers: what excites Americans, what terrifies them, what makes them sad, and what makes them curious.

This isn’t an editorial meeting somewhere in the US. Everyone here is less than twenty-three years old, and they’re perched in an all-glass office in a shopping mall in Indore, a medium-sized city in central India. They’re deciding, a few hours before America wakes up, what it will read when it does.

They are hardly ever wrong—or so say the numbers. Millions of people visit their website, WittyFeed, every day. Of them, 80 per cent are foreigners and half these people are from the US. WittyFeed is one of the world’s fastest-growing content farms; over a billion people follow it on Facebook alone. The only website of its kind visited by more people is BuzzFeed, the world leader in viral content. Currently valued at only 30 million dollars, WittyFeed is giving itself a couple of years to beat BuzzFeed. That’s not its ultimate goal, though. What the plucky youngsters who run it want to do is to build the world’s largest media company (‘bigger than BBC, CNN’). How do they hope to do it? By following their maxim: ‘It’s emotion that goes viral.’

Few people have heard of WittyFeed, even in India. The only reason I’m here is because I noticed its crazy numbers: 82 million monthly visits, 1.5 billion page views, 170 million users, 4.2 million likes on Facebook. WittyFeed is news by the same parameter that it uses to define news: the WTF factor. How can a bunch of kids in a small Indian town who have never seen the world dream of ruling it by simply getting the internet better than anyone else?

In May 2016, I went to Indore to decide for myself if WittyFeed could indeed become the biggest media company in the world. Whether or not I found an answer to that question, I would at least get to hang out with a bunch of Indians who live in the internet. Flying in from Delhi, Indore looks small along every dimension: the width of its roads, the height of its buildings, the price of one night’s stay at a mid-scale hotel. The signs of aspiration are all there, however. Cool coffee shops are coming up on cow-populated lanes; rock concerts are advertised on billboards; and youngsters wander its streets in Instagram-ready outfits.

But Indore’s new spirit of enterprise peaks in WittyFeed’s 10,000-square-foot office on the ninth floor of the town’s tallest commercial tower. It is decorated in a wide-eyed image of Silicon Valley. The walls are a canvas for everything central to the company’s self-image, from an elaborate graphic illustration of WittyFeed’s journey to icons of their favourite social media companies—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and Snapchat—to the collage of a ‘start-up alphabet’ (creativity, crazy, courage . . .). Between these colourful walls, the open-plan office is a window into the company’s hopeful, global soul: exposed brick and espresso machine, beanbags and a ping-pong table, a corner where the employees can wind down and an enclosure where they can work out. The office is designed such that, if you’re not staring into your slim laptop, you’re forced to look at something inspirational. Something that’s meant to make an employee think as big, and American, as possible. It could be the blown-up face of a celebrity—Marilyn Monroe, perhaps, or Madonna. It could be nuggets of espresso-shot motivation—‘99.9 per cent is not 100 per cent’ or ‘Set Goal. Reach. Repeat’. Or it could be a triptych of the most inspiring Americans according to WittyFeed—Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Should they be hit by self-doubt amid this architecture of inspiration, all they have to do is stand outside the office of the company’s CEO and look at the image of an enormous Aladdin voicing the words that power millions of dreams across India every day: ‘The universe is a genie . . . it always says, "your wish is my command’’.’ The CEO’s office has a name: Winterfell. So do the bathrooms: the men’s is called ‘Khal’ and the women’s ‘Khaleesi’. Like the violent medieval world of Game of Thrones, WittyFeed runs on the hunger for power, and for other people’s territory.

The twenty-something workforce live together in a couple of large bungalows, are told to regard each other as brothers and sisters, and reach out to the Chief Content Officer, or CCO, if they are out of shampoo or toothpaste. To enter the world of WittyFeed, they must leave their past at the door. It feels almost like a cult designed by millennials, for millennials: The chance of getting in goes up the less of a past they have to begin with. The conditions are stated clearly to anyone who wants to work at WittyFeed. This must be their first job, and they must want it bad. The company actually prefers people with poor work experience and education. What it wants from a candidate in an interview—which can stretch over a whole day—is the answer to a question it considers central to their eligibility: Who are you? The answer can be a monologue or a manic dance around the room; the second may win more points.

Most young Indians who take that interview will have been asked that question for the first time. It isn’t something that young people in India have ever been encouraged to ask: Who are you? In a society where who you are—caste, class, region, religion—is decided for you long before you are born, ‘wokeness’ is a luxury. This is the defining difference between this generation of Indians, and most of those that have come before.

Applicants put themselves through this existential interrogation because they are desperate for a job and this is their only chance. Of the first three WittyFeed employees I met in Indore, two had recently lost their fathers and found themselves supporting their entire family. Fitting into WittyFeed’s world is an experience most of them described to me as strange but life-changing. A week at the company is all it takes them to go from not knowing anything about the world to deciding what the world should know. It is not easy. You don’t just wake up and write a definitive cure for American break-up blues if you are an eighteen-year-old girl in Indore who has never been on a date. You start by learning how to think like the audience you want to reach: an American kid who wants an ‘AI butler like Iron Man’s Jarvis’, or a hipster looking for an app that will allow him to ‘teabag’ American politicians, or a Tinder user who wants to master the art of ‘bread-crumbing’—flirty yet non-committal texts. And you then get into the spirit—or the spirit gets into you. Every thought in your head is a potential idea for a viral post; it flashes before your eyes complete with the number of people who are likely to click on it. If you’re good, some of them come attached with a thumbnail image. Sometimes you think you are going crazy; then you look around and no one appears any saner.

‘One day Parveen bhaiyya—the CCO—was on a flight back to Indore from somewhere. He was using the loo when an idea came to him: Where does your poop go in an aeroplane? The moment he was back, he came over and shared the idea with us. We published a story around it the same day. It went super viral. 315,000 views. The idea was copied across the content industry.’ Lavanya Srivastav is showing me around the office. We have just come out of the editorial meeting and everyone’s on it. Someone in ‘content’ is tracking Selena Gomez on Instagram, someone in ‘tech’ is building a hack to beat Facebook’s audience limit, and someone in ‘engagement’ is updating a list of topics likely to trend over the next two hours. In every corner of the office, a screen is flashing the number of people on the website at any second. ‘Nine thousand people now,’ says Srivastav, with a flick of her shoulder in the direction of a screen.

Srivastav looks even younger than she is: chubby, curly-haired, twinkly-eyed. She joined WittyFeed two years ago, when she was twenty. ‘They didn’t ask me what I had done before. They asked me to sing. It was hard to sing in front of strangers, but I went along with the moment.’ She needed the job. ‘When my father died, it was hard for my mother to return to work because of her age. I have a little sister. I was in college in our home town in Gujarat, but I started looking for a job. One day I came to know there is a start-up in Indore that was hiring.’ Srivastav’s now the chief of content at WittyFeed. She began her writing career with a post on relationship advice. ‘At first I didn’t know what to say. You can’t just write something like that. You have to be genuine. I started digging deep within myself, reading up. It was very important to put sentiment in such a piece. With time, we found our tone. Now we know how to write stories of great transformation. Say, someone who has a scar but is living her life. Ladies out there who we are trying to reach get inspired by these stories.’

She has helped contribute several other categories to WittyFeed’s content mix over the two years: cats, beards, OMG. Her OMG instinct is seldom off: It’s where she slotted the poop story. Written by WittyFeed’s resident ‘poop expert’, ‘What Happens to Your Poop in an Airplane Toilet Will Leave You Surprised’ swiftly got to half a million views. The thumbnail shows a pair of legs in front of a toilet seat, red panties pulled down to its knees. Her first viral story—a photo puzzle titled ‘A Husband Divorced His Wife after Looking Closer at this Picture’—was about a guy who comes home to find a man hiding under his wife’s bed. Over 3 million people have viewed it so far. Her second viral story featured a lip-sync battle between Dwayne Johnson and Taylor Swift. ‘It was shared by George Takei, of Star Trek. Suddenly, there were 50,000 people on the website. I was so thrilled. People were liking it, sharing it, commenting on it. That’s when I knew, you know, that there is something right about what I do.’ Her faith in the power of sharing validated, Srivastav threw herself into the WittyFeed life. Her mother and sister moved to Indore to live with her in a rented house. They have given up wondering about her unusual lifestyle. ‘You are feeding American curiosity. There is always a story to do at three in the morning. You can’t come into office at ten and do it; virality doesn’t work like that.’

With every day at her job, she says she gets better at relating to her audience, no matter how different their world is from hers. ‘I wrote a DIY story on how to make a swimming pool in your garden. Title—we kept it very relatable—This Man Couldn’t Afford a Swimming Pool but What He Did Next Is Truly Fantastic. It went viral. We have other ways. The moment you tell someone you are doing something wrong, automatically they will want to know. My story The Way You Brush Your Teeth Is Wrong and You Don’t Even Know about It! got 2 million views. After the success of the airline poop story, we started to do a lot of ever wondered stories. Ever Wondered What Female Astronauts Do When They Get Periods in Space? One of our writers explained.’

Not every story hits a million views, but they are supposed to reach a minimum of 100,000. This is why so few survive the editorial wringer. ‘You know the moment when you are scrolling through your Facebook feed, going through links without paying much attention, and then suddenly you scroll past something, and it makes you so curious you scroll back to click on the link—that’s the kind of pull we put in our content. It should force you to click on it.’ No law of clickbait science is overlooked. ‘We have a system where we track every keyword that is important for virality—terrifying, shocking, inspirational.’

With every passing minute of our conversation, Srivastav’s tone becomes more authoritative. She still looks like a teenager, but one who talks like a Silicon Valley boss. ‘Together we control 1 million reach on Facebook alone through 50,000 pages as affiliates—popular pages on nail art, relationships, health and lifestyle. They should have at least 40,000 followers. They share our posts, we share revenue with them based on how many clicks they enabled. Ninety per cent of our traffic comes from Facebook. Usually, Indian and other clicks are non-premium. US, UK, Canada, Australia are premium. If I give $1 for 1000 clicks for India, I will give $7 for an American click.’ She uses a similar formula to calculate the payment for the company’s writers. ‘Over 150 writers across the world—Philippines, China, Spain.’ We are sitting at her desk, a long table she shares with eight other members of the content team. Some of them are currently reaching out to freelance writers in South America who can power exclusive Spanish-language content on their website. ‘The demand has been insane.’

Srivastav clearly no longer works just to support her family. She doesn’t even see herself as an employee. ‘Everyone here is an entrepreneur. Everyone wants to be something.’ The last thought to hit her before she falls asleep in the early morning is not about the next day’s tasks but the next global city for the company’s expansion. ‘We want to open an office in LA. We are already setting up one in Singapore. Our main audience is America, so why should we think small?’ Before I can applaud her ambition, she is off to interview a nineteen-yearold who has showed up at the reception. A couple of hours later, Srivastav tells me she wasn’t impressed by the college student’s attitude. The girl didn’t have enough hunger.

The standard is set by the CEO, who constantly surveys the level of hunger around the newsroom from his seat in Winterfell. Like Ned Stark, the upright lord from Game of Thrones, he sits flanked by his trusted commanders—the CCO, who happens to be his younger brother, and the CTO, his best friend from college. Singhal’s right hand is encased in plaster of Paris. ‘Got upset about something and hit a wall,’ he says.

Singhal seems to be aware that he is not entirely a normal person. He is thankful for his madness, though; it has brought him this far. Singhal grew up in a small village in Haryana where his father worked as a middleman, connecting farmers to the grain market. The first madness to grip him, at the age of sixteen, was to make money—lots and lots and lots of it. ‘I wanted to be the richest person in the world. Starting with my village, then my block, then my district, then my state, then my country, and finally the world.’ He had no idea how anyone became so rich, however. Most people in the village worked in and around farms; not one had made it past the tenth grade. Singhal decided to become a software engineer; it’s what young people across India seemed to be doing to get rich. He moved to Delhi and started preparing for entrance tests to engineering colleges.

And then the second biggest madness of his life struck him. ‘In Delhi I started reading newspapers, watching news channels and I realized that assholes were running our country. I was always patriotic—I love India and can literally do anything for it—but now I took a vow to claim the country back.’ In 2009, the Congress party was about to enter its second term in power, and disillusioned youth across the country were gunning for change. In 2010, Singhal went to an engineering college in Tamil Nadu to get a degree in computer engineering. ‘I really wanted to do something with the computer, some kind of business around it, but I realized I didn’t have it in me to become a programmer.’ Then, he discovered the internet, and shortly after, the world. ‘The internet is the most powerful tool the world has ever invented. I became obsessed.’

Singhal realized he could employ the internet to achieve both his ends: become rich and fix the country. He already had a team that included his younger brother, who had followed him to the same college, and several classmates who wanted the same things as him. ‘We started two things: a small business where we charged companies for developing their websites, and a website, Badlega India (India will change), where we posted things we thought young people should know about the country, from noteworthy news to personalities to monuments.’ Badlega India was Singhal’s idea of what India should be, powered by completely imaginary facts (India has lost ₹7,30,00,00,00,00,00,000 to corruption since Independence—enough money, among other things, to build 1.4 million low-cost houses) and extreme prescriptions (Should there be a ‘citizen’s charter’ in public service offices, and severe punishments for not completing the jobs according to this charter?). ‘My patriotism had hit its peak. I was blind with anger. A great country spoilt by some idiotic people chosen by us because of lack of awareness, who make wrong laws.’ When he was not publishing articles calling for ‘a youth revolution’, he organized meetings and candlelit marches to the same end.

Nothing came of this, however, neither his business nor his activism. But his team did hit a gold mine where they were least expecting it. In late 2011, Singhal’s younger brother, Parveen, then seventeen, set up a Facebook page to post ‘amazing Indian things’. ‘I had just discovered the internet. I was blown away by the things you could do,’ says Parveen Singhal, now twenty-two and a proud digital native. ‘I spent months watching every available movie on YouTube. It was so much fun. Then I discovered Facebook. I signed up, created a profile, started making friends, talking to them. I found it so interesting. Then I realized that you could create a page to post things you wanted to share with the whole world.’ The page was called ‘Amazing Things in the World’, but all he posted on it were photos of Indian monuments like Akshardham and the Lotus Temple in Delhi. Within a month, thousands of people liked it. ‘The interest was building. We thought why only buildings, why only India. There are so many things we see interesting in life. People, places, adventure, technology. Soon enough, half the likes on that page were from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada. Within a year the page had 1 million likes. It changed our whole story. The page has 4.2 million likes today. Whatever we are today, it’s because of that single page.’

Once the Singhals figured out the market for content, it quickly led them to the idea of a website where they would only publish stuff that people couldn’t resist—‘junk food for the brain’, as some now call viral content. The brothers applied to the publishing business the same formula that they had seen their father use in the grain market: arrive early and sell hard. They cared neither about the language—neither had encountered English before leaving their village—nor the substance of the stories they put up on WittyFeed. They cared only about their ability to hit the spot emotionally, from horny confessions to parenting disasters. It’s not one’s grip on facts that works in the business of clickbait, Vinay Singhal tells me about his post-truth world, but one’s grip on people. ‘Viral is in my head.’ He had cracked the route to at least one of his dreams: becoming rich.

In 2014, the Singhals moved to Indore, where the third partner in their viral news business had grown up. The city was big enough to be full of young job aspirants and small enough to present them with few options. The young men pooled family resources, rented a small office in a shopping mall, hired a group of youngsters low on education and experience, and started churning out listicles: Seven Secret Tips to Please Your Boyfriend, Fourteen Secret Confessions by Horny Girls, Ten Weirdest Faces of Katy Perry. A couple of months after Srivastav joined the company, WittyFeed hit the million mark. The Singhals bought their first bungalow in Indore and brought their parents down from their village in Haryana.

Their father now spends his days running the city’s trendiest clothing store in a swanky shopping mall. ‘We started this shop for him where we sell only one fashion item of one kind. If you buy a dress from this shop you can be sure no one else in town has it.’ The business model is another win for the brothers, but their father is still dealing with the shock of going from selling grains to selling cropped tops. ‘He feels a little low, a little depressed. It’s only college girls who come to the shop, they all speak to him in English. He gets disturbed by the short, cut-up clothes that are in demand. He used to work hard in the village. At forty-five, he has nothing left to do.’ Later that evening, I stopped by the shop. Surrounded by stacks of the latest arrivals in halter dresses and torn jeans, Singhal senior appeared bored. I asked him if there was anything he likes about his new life. He nodded vaguely. I bought a long skirt to make him feel less hopeless about the

Reviews for Dreamers

[opinionated_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is excellent; and through her portrait of young Indians seeking to fulfil their dreams, Snigdha Poonam asks an important question - how on Earth will India provide not just the jobs, but the aspirational lifestyles that its young people not only aspire to but demand? Throughout this portrait of 7 groups of young people and their chosen routes to their "dream" the overwhelming themes are self belief and optimism. You can't help but root for Moin Khan as he progresses from consumer of cheap English classes to teacher of them to, as he hopes, to English language lesson entrepreneur. You can't help but admire the founders of Witty Feed as they aim for world media domination from the unpromising roots of Indore - they haven't got there yet, but they are doing pretty well, and fulfilling the cult like devotion of their young acolytes. You can even feel some sympathy for the call centre scammers - if Americans are so dumb as to give away their passwords to people pretending to be from the IRS then how superior can they actually be?Its a wild ride that Poonam goes on, sometimes scary, sometimes hilarious. Its scary when bombs are lobbed at the very impressive Student Union leader Richa Singh, its funny when, no matter what she does, she can't land a call centre job (perhaps her "40% English" isn't good enough?) its poignant when, called on to be an emergency judge at a beauty pageant (someone doesn't turn up) she sees the desperation to leave her rural village and boring life in a contestants eyes and is as kind and encouraging as possible, and pathetic (at least to my eyes) when she spends a night with the Cow Protection PatrolReally this shouldn't be subtitled "How Young Indians Are Changing The World" because although some undoubtedly are, its not Ms Poonam's subjects. A better title might have been How Young Indians Want To Change The World. It's really very good

[rajivc_18 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book by Snigdha Poonam is excellent. She has invested considerable time in meeting India's younger generation and following their stories. She divided the book into three sections - No Plan B, The Angry, The Scammers. I have not written the exact titles of the sections but I hope you get the idea. Then, she followed up with the stories of the various people she met. The epilogue is excellent. Why do I like the book? Her book portrayed India's youth's feelings of restlessness, significance, uncertainty, and ambition.. She stayed away from any criticism of our politicians, but her opinions and fears seep through in her words. The stories bring the book to life more than any scholarly analysis does. Read the book.