Voices of a Generation: An Interview with A.M. Gautam on INDIAN MILLENNIALS
Photo courtesy: A.M. Gautam
In a lengthy conversation, A.M. Gautam, the author of Indian Millennials: Who Are They, Really? (2024), speaks about the many anxieties and opportunities of the Indian millennial, themes of romance, employment, politics, and commerce, and discovering his own self while exploring the larger generation.
Growing up in Varanasi in the 80s and 90s, there was a time in my life when encountering a ‘culture shock’ often required a drastic physical displacement. My worldview was mostly limited to Uttar Pradesh, a few neighbouring states in North India, and (in moments of ambitious family holidays), New Delhi. I remember fawning over the magic of escalators at a mall in Kathmandu on my first trip to Nepal, and tentatively grimacing with each taste of prawn in garlic sauce at a restaurant in Connaught Place. Any exposure to the rest of the world was the curated monoculture of Bollywood, television ads, and the foreignness of names and faces lining up opposite India in international cricket matches.
Little would I know that, soon, the world around my little cocoon was about to be revolutionized. Economic liberalization allowed young people of my generation access to products and experiences like never before (that first sizzle taste of Fountain Coke was spectacular). The internet thrust the knowledge of an entire world to a click of the mouse (for those of us who had trained ourselves with great yogic patience spending entire afternoons waiting for Altavista.com to load). Every cause and concern on Earth—and even the galaxies beyond—was soon available in a heavy little device that sagged into our trouser pockets.
With an endless array of information swimming in my apps, just a flick of my thumb away, ‘culture shock’ didn’t require a great displacement anymore. The only ‘shock’ was in a retrospection of how rapidly the world has changed—in how little time.
Born in the mid-80s, I am part of what is described as the ‘millennial’ generation in India, a population of hundreds of millions which constitute of 34 per cent of the country’s population and 46 per cent of the workforce. Millennials are the driving force behind much of the country’s mainstream culture, the target audience for trends in work-life balance, films, food, spirituality, romance, body-image, politics, news, and more. It is a generation shaped by the consumerism and the never-ending options of a world globalized by the internet. But it is also the generation that can often remember the ‘before’ days with clarity: pre-internet, pre-social media, pre-Fountain Coke. In developing nations like India, millennials have seen the world change at a pace like none other before.
“Our culture is steeped in individualism and consumerism, so there’s a constant pressure on all of us to appear unique… At the same time, since we all are exposed to more or less the same discourse, aesthetic, and labels, we want to stick to whatever identity-group we feel best about, and we behave accordingly. Hence, we conform because we don’t want to conform.”
How does one even begin to explain the grand impact of such a change, especially upon the world’s most-populous nation? In Indian Millennials: Who Are They, Really? (Aleph Book Company, 2024), A.M. Gautam faces these larger questions with a series of incisive essays about our generation, confronting issues of language, pop culture, romance, media, disinformation, politics, and the upcoming apocalypse, too. Gautam is a millennial himself, and was raised in Haridwar (another city in the north Indian Gangetic Belt). In each essay of this collection, he puts himself front and centre of these confrontations, and dives deep into the concerns of Indian millennials with a curious sense of discovery and self-reflection.
In a lengthy conversation, Gautam spoke about the many anxieties and opportunities of the Indian millennial, themes of romance, employment, politics, and commerce, and discovering his own self while exploring the larger generation.
The Chakkar: You introduce the collection with a conversation with a millennial-aged man, Soham, who doesn’t know what a ‘millennial’ is. When I finished reading the book, I thought of Soham again, and the bliss he must enjoy without adhering to any generational labels. In your time thinking about millennials in India, do you feel that we have found ourselves in a kind of self-serving trap: where, by thinking of ourselves as ‘millennials’, we fall into a cultural ubiquity where we all consume the same pop culture, speak in the same lingo, and share the same anxieties? I guess another way of asking this question would be: Do you feel that urban Indian millennials are skewing towards a kind of monoculture?
Gautam: It’s a paradox, really. Our culture is steeped in individualism and consumerism, so there’s a constant pressure on all of us to appear unique. You know how obsessed everyone is with their particular ‘brand’. At the same time, since we all are exposed to more or less the same discourse, aesthetic, and labels, we want to stick to whatever identity-group we feel best about, and we behave accordingly. Hence, we conform because we don’t want to conform.
It can often be harmless, and doesn’t warrant cynicism. I know so many writers my age who (just like me) love sitting in a Third Wave, Blue Tokai, or Starbucks, with a mug of Americano, because it makes them—us—feel writer-like, right? If they do put up a picture of themselves on Instagram while they’re at it, I don’t think it impacts their writing any which way. You don’t need to sit in a musty attic with a typewriter and call forth the spirit of Rahi Masoom Raza in order to write original stuff.
“Before I wrote the first word of this book, it was quite clear to me that I didn’t want to write the sort of sociological treatise where I’d stand apart from the people I’m writing about. This is why all these essays are rooted in my personal experiences and curiosities.”
Also, I don’t think this is happening only to the millennials, because similar trends of individual insecurities, biases, ideas boiling down into a sort of common language can be observed in other demographics. I mean have you seen how accurate is the stereotyping of middle-aged men in north India, fondly referred to as Uncles? I’m not saying all of them are bigoted creepy paedophiles, because hey, all generalizations are dangerous; I’m only saying that no one’s surprised when one of them does turn out to be a bigoted creepy paedophile.
I’m sorry, let’s come back to the millennials.
The Chakkar: You mentioned that “our generation did not invent misinformation or lies, but we are the first ones to cross over into a post-truth world where all assertions are doubled-faced, elastic, and subject to wilful misinterpretation” (xviii). I have often thought about how millennials in many developing nations such as ours have likely faced the greatest perspective shift of any generation in history, leaping from a childhood of Doordarshan and All India Radio to a liberalized economy in a technologically connected world. As kids, we formed our belief system around sacred tenets, often passed word-of-mouth by our elders; as adults, we can’t even trust video proof of any incident in case it might be AI-generated. Do you feel that this particular experience is a strength for Indian millennials, or are we burdened by this anxious tightrope walk?
Gautam: The post-truth reality in strength vs. burden terms? Interesting… I think the keyword in the sentence you quote from my book is ‘wilful’. Wilful misrepresentation. In most cases, we believe what we want to believe and what has changed, really, is just that you can now go out on the internet and find the evidence needed to support your beliefs. Say, I am a guy in Haridwar and I watch a video that shows policemen storming the JNU library and beating up students. If I am a right-wing guy, I will look for videos, articles, news anchors who tell me that the students were actually all ‘criminal-types’, and I will find all this easily available for my consumption. I’ll be glad the police gave them what they deserved. Even before AI came around, people who wanted to hear college students saying “Bharat tere tukde honge” could hear it clearly in the videos, even though you and I will not be able to hear that in the exact same video. On the other hand, people will not believe it when a report says that press freedom has plummeted in India, or when Hindenberg says that Adani has played dirtier than other dirty capitalists. You could find similar biases among the left-wingers too, of course.
In this sense, the post-truth reality is a sort of strength for people who are comfortable with their cognitive bias, or ignorant of it—which is kind of the same thing. The only people for whom it is a burden are those who are free of ideological dogma, and want facts to be facts.
For example, after all this time, I still don’t know which community—if either—has more valid points in the Manipur conflict. I don’t really know whether a particular athlete in the Paris Olympics was a man or a woman despite reading and hearing a lot from both sides. It would be easier to take someone’s word on these things, but I find myself unable to find anyone without agendas of their own, and that’s the sort of burden that comes with living in a post-truth reality.
The Chakkar: Throughout the book, you were also forthright about your own insecurities, misgivings, or simply sharing the private details of your own life as an Indian millennial. This included your body-image insecurities, your evolving views towards caste and food as someone raised in Haridwar, your father’s death, and personal relationships. You mentioned in the essay “At Thirty, Am I Still A Liberal?” that when you proclaimed yourself a liberal at 19, you were “blissfully ignorant” of caste/religious segregation even in your hometown. How would you say this process of self-reflection has impacted you? Your book’s full title asks, Indian Millenials: Who Are They Really?, did you find yourself asking, ‘Who Am I, Really?’, too?
Gautam: Yes, of course. Before I wrote the first word of this book, it was quite clear to me that I didn’t want to write the sort of sociological treatise where I’d stand apart from the people I’m writing about. This is why all these essays are rooted in my personal experiences and curiosities. I have only researched and written about the stuff that I wanted to examine and find out more about the times we live in. This approach, like any other, comes with its own compromises, but I’ve made these compromises willingly. I couldn’t really write about millennials in rural India, for example, and I couldn’t include the female perspective as much as I’d have liked. I also could not talk about queer folks in my essay about the awaaragardi of millennial hearts, because I just didn’t feel honest in doing that. No amount of research or interviews could help me articulate the experience of what it means to be a gay person, a woman, or a farmer in this country.
This is a problem that ails all non-fiction. Fiction is able to embrace nuance and blind spots much more naturally because, to paraphrase Gaiman, it doesn’t need you to depend on facts for telling the truth. However, a very good thing (for me, I mean) that came from taking this approach—looking at my generation by way of navel-gazing—is that I was able to challenge many of my strongly-held convictions about everything from apoliticism to being conscious about the environment. It’s painful to radically alter the way you look at the world, but there’s a strange pleasure in it too.
The Chakkar: The book is hyper-focused on the present, with news and trends developing every day that probably evolve your perspective on the challenges and anxieties of this generation. Since you submitted the final draft to the publishers, has there been anything in the news or any major social event that you wish you could’ve included?
“All I am saying is that if you pick up each and every crisis that comes along on the conveyor belt of our global information system, the noise will drive you bitter, cynical, and self-righteous to the point of insanity. We can’t feign ignorance, but I think it’s better to be honest to ourselves about our powerlessness.”
Gautam: Many things, yes, but for better or worse, there have been no new developments that would make me question the positions I’ve taken in the book. It might have been fun to write an investigative piece about the Lok Sabha election results in Ayodhya, about our tendency to lump together the people outside our own cultural bubble as the “masses” who—we believe—will always behave according to our assumptions about them.
The Chakkar: In “The Awaaragardi of Millennial Hearts”, you wrote about romance, and this weird mix of influences on Indian millennials, where we are just leaving the shackles of our parents’ generation’s ideas of arranged marriage strictly within the community, to our own childhood raised on American sitcoms and the ‘foreign’ idea of asking someone out for coffee. You write that this generation has been making up our “new set of Love Laws”, where even asking someone out for a date felt like a “pre-wedding ritual” (126-127). Could you describe what these new ‘Love Laws’ are for this generation? How do you think this ‘millennial approach’ to romance—an admixture of traditional and modern—will continue, as millennials themselves become parents and try to interfere with the romantic lives of their children?
Gautam: Well, that’s the thing, right? The New Love Laws are the Old Love Laws with better aesthetic and good PR. So, instead of having arranged marriages, maybe you have more people saying that theirs is a ‘love-arranged marriage’, which means that the bride and groom agreed to say I-love-yous before fucking each other with the blessings of their parents. We have wedding shoots to compete with Bollywood movies now, and romance can easily be manufactured in front of the camera. The so-called upper-castes may be getting a little more comfortable with mixing their gene pools, but I don’t know anyone my age who could marry a Dalit person without getting into a lot of melodrama. Inter-religion marriages are, of course, marred by malignant fictions like “love-jihad”.
Also, we must bear in mind that this is only a particular segment of millennials we are talking about. If you are wealthy enough, you can do what you want, the Love Laws—just like any other laws—do not apply to you. On the other hand, if you are poor, like most of the people in this country, then you operate in a world with wholly different rules, etiquettes, and definitions of concepts like love, consent, happiness, or modernity.
As to your other question, Millennials will interfere with the romantic lives of their children, yes, but I think the children are going to be much better prepared to block that interference.
“For me, Ruskin Bond is important because his stories are some of the earliest fiction I ever read, and he is close to home, metaphorically and literally—his home in Landour being about three hour away from my own in Haridwar… I don’t think there exists another interview of him that’s as broad or detailed as this one.”
The Chakkar: The essay “Anti-CAA Protests and the Thing About Silence” is a complex meditation between political solidarity and apolitical silence in India. Every generation of young has had its great reckoning with political turmoil—but millennials are the first one where this turmoil is complicated with the easy access to social media, where each of us is pushed into having an opinion on every world issue. But once the toothpaste is spilled out of the tube, it can’t be undone; as in, once I learn about certain atrocities, I simply can’t feign ignorance any more. How does one choose “silence” with so much knowledge (and so much misinformation) at our fingertips?
Gautam: Oh, I am not advising people to choose silence at all. All I am saying is that if you pick up each and every crisis that comes along on the conveyor belt of our global information system, the noise will drive you bitter, cynical, and self-righteous to the point of insanity. We can’t feign ignorance, but I think it’s better to be honest to ourselves about our powerlessness.
I agree with you, of course, that this may not always be possible in action when social media provides us such easy means of expression. Just the other day, I woke up and the very first thing I read, while still in bed, was how the terrorist state of Israel had murdered a girl—a toddler, really—by making pagers explode in Lebanon. It made me so sad, and I couldn’t really make myself eat my breakfast. On the way to work, I kept thinking how her death would simply be brushed aside as ‘collateral damage’ by the world. When I reached work, I wrote a rant on my Instagram story about this. Then, I deleted the story a few minutes later. What would my 300-odd followers do about it? What can anyone do about it? What could anyone do when Obama (first Black American president, yay!) killed so many children with his record rate of drone strikes? We still ask his book recommendations for our summer reading. I could quote hundreds of such examples, but that’s beside the point, and I’m not Chomsky. All I can say is that I hate the fact that a kid, any number of kids, can be butchered and we can deal with it by typing a few words on our smartphones, or even by putting it eloquently in our writing.
I reject this comfort of outrage; I’d much rather be plain impotent than impotent, self-righteous, and delusional about my impotence.
The Chakkar: One of your later chapters is a long interview with the prolific author Ruskin Bond on a variety of topics: publishing, horror stories, politics, the environment, etc. Bond turned 90 this year and has been publishing since the 1950s, meaning that there have been multiple generations of Indians who have grown up to his words, and an interview like this could’ve been a part of a collection about Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers, too. What is it about his work that you felt spoke more specifically to millennials in India?
Gautam: All of us are products of the past to a greater or lesser degree, so it wasn’t so much a question of his specific appeal to the millennials that made me interview him. Rather, it was the fact that he has written for each generation, right from what’s commonly called the Silent Generation, to the Millennials, and probably even the next few generations. He enjoys the kind of universal appeal that’s very rare among Indian English writers. I know so many people who never read anything, but even they have somehow read Ruskin Bond—in their school textbooks, via something that ran in a newspaper, from a book some kid was reading around them. At the very least, they’ve heard of him, and they know him as one of the two major children’s writers, along with Sudha Murty (which I would say is a gross reduction of Bond’s writing and a very generous comparison for Murty). Then there’s the fact that Bond’s life choices—whether it’s about leaving a job to go live in the mountains, choosing adoption instead of a traditional family unit, etc.—are reflected in many of the most popular millennial aspirations.
For me, Ruskin Bond is important because his stories are some of the earliest fiction I ever read, and he is close to home, metaphorically and literally—his home in Landour being about three hour away from my own in Haridwar. I am actually very grateful that he agreed to meet me for such a long conversation, just about a month after his 89th birthday. I don’t think there exists another interview of him that’s as broad or detailed as this one.
The Chakkar: What do you predict will be the legacy of Indian millennials for future generations? Twenty years from now, when a Gen-Z author writes a book about their generation, how do you think millennials will be remembered?
Gautam: Oh, the Gen-Z will have mini-temples in their homes with photographs of their millennial idols. They will remember us with tears of fondness. They are good kids like that. I’m kidding, in case that’s not clear to someone who has modelled themselves after Sheldon Cooper.
I’ll refrain from answering this one, because the way our world’s spinning these days, it’s impossible to say what will people find relevant next year, let alone twenty years from now. But let’s hope our hypothetical Gen-Z writer will indeed have the privilege of writing their book while they somehow make enough money to afford drinking water, clean air, and iPhone 36 Super Duper Pro Max Ultra.
The Chakkar: Since you dedicated a full chapter to the word, what is the most “cringe” thing you've experienced since the release of this book (besides this interview)?
Gautam: Hahaha. The most “cringe” thing I’ve experienced since this book was released? Promoting one’s own work is always cringe, I guess. The second place in my list of cringiest stuff, however, is reserved for the self-righteousness tone people employ when they refer to certain books and authors as “problematic” or “privileged”. An unfortunate outcome of being a writer is that I come across this quite frequently. But I guess it’s self-righteousness, in general, that makes me cringe the most these days.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. His debut novel A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company) was published in October 2022. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle, The Bombay Review, Fifty Two, Scroll, The Caravan, the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph Book Company) and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 (Hawakal). His nonfiction book, Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis in India will be published by the Aleph Book Company in December 2024. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
