India: Land Without Youth

...He is at school, he has friends, he takes in an occasional movie, and he has a rudimentary interest in affairs around him...

...Sharokh Sabavala is the Christian Science Monitor's regular correspondent in India...

...But precious little is being done, or has been done in the 15 years since independence, to bring about a change...

...That is a question for the philosophers to ponder...

...At the same age the girl is married off to the first available groom, be he old, young, poor, diseased, one-eyed or lame—just so long as he is of the male species and can feed an extra mouth...

...The young boy who is forced to earn a living after high school finds he does not know anything, and, what is worse, his ability to learn anything is likely to have been impaired rather than developed during his few years of schooling...

...World Youth Today - V This is the fifth in a series of articles which began with "Britain's Cautious Generation" by Ruth Langdon Inglis (April 15), followed by "Germany: The Decline of Tradition" by John Mander (May 27), "New Heroes in France" by Herbert Lottman (June 24), and "Japan's Flaming Conservatives" by Edward Seidensticker (July 22...

...Even here, however, this period is shorter by far than in any Western country—except at the upper-strata of Indian society...

...To the young, tomorrow has always been a frightful prospect...

...For Bombay is not merely the Hollywood of India but also the New York and Manchester...

...If Prime Minister Nehru comes to town and addresses a public meeting, he makes up his mind whether to go there and stare with veneration at what long ago used to be the symbol of India's youth, or to ignore what he regards as the fulminations of a tired old man...

...Most Indians who go abroad to represent their country at youth congresses are more often than not in their 40s...

...Then there is the other half, the half where a boy or a girl distinctly does hit a period of youth...

...Even during this brief period of belated youth his reactions are heavy, his tastes pedestrian and his interests just barely decent...

...Indian youth lies buried in a heap of rubble...

...But while the consumer needs little encouragement to get up and consume, the producer does need a lot of organizing before he can produce even as much as he himself consumes...

...They are born in a lying-in hospital as against an unused barn or an open field...

...Unfortunately, for the small number of young people who do manage to go to high school, the rulers have made education something of a joke...

...and indulges in youthful hankerings perhaps for five or six years...

...These young people are indeed tomorrow's rulers, captains of industry, and real possessors...

...In this set, boys and girls mix...

...Anyone studying Indian youth must run into this smart minority...

...They are the sons and daughters of the upper-crust—a very thin but nevertheless very powerful upper-crust...

...Similarly, the girl goes to school—a non-coeducational school— mixes with other girls, eyes the boys from a distance, but rarely has the opportunity to step out of the homeschool-home circuit...

...in the hundreds of government offices in Delhi one does find determined young women hacking away at a typewriter during the day and filling the cup of enjoyment to the brim in the evening...

...They are in all the cities, at all the fashionable hill and sea resorts, and in the country's overcrowded trains and planes...

...Their youth, such as it is, consists of denials, hardships, physical labor, acute misery and a numbness of the brain that has to be seen to be believed...

...The prbolems of juvenile delinquency, of participating in popular political movements, of having opinions, of being individuals, therefore never confront Indian youth...

...Give us this day our share of youth might well be the prayer of the young people of India...

...India: Land Without Youth By Sharokh Sabavala New Delhi When writing about youth in India one comes up against the painful realization that for half the country's population there is no such period as youth...

...What Indian youth wants more than anything else is a bit of youth, a time in which to realize themselves as individuals and to develop a sense of personal ambition...

...This half begins life as tiny tots who are a nuisance to their parents because they prevent them from doing their day's work...

...They sip double sundaes and swing to the latest rhythms...

...Throughout these foregoing paragraphs the pronoun "he" has been used advisedly...

...It is probably little realized, however, that one of the greatest failures has been the nation's inability to provide the majority of its citizens a few years of youth...

...Their short and unhappy effervescence, alas, ends in tragedy with as much certainty as night follows day...

...These lucky youngsters' lives follow a Western pattern...

...The youth in India are thus submerged into the general body politic of the country, squirming to get free, to get a whiff of air...

...There is no log-cabin-to-president story here to inspire them, no chance for them to grab at the fruits of modern technology that the Western world has made available to vast numbers of human beings and of which the young, as well as the old, have heard...

...After that, bingo, they are earning members of the family, pulling their full weight to keep the wolf from the door...

...All the struggle is removed, all the corners are rounded...

...Is it good or bad that one-fifth of the population of the world is catapulted straight from childhood into adulthood...

...They swim, hike, picnic and generally horse around quite as much as their Western counterparts...

...Yet, such is the diversity and disparity of India that in the suburbs of Bombay and Calcutta one does run into true-to-type Teddy boys and Byculla yankees...

...Educational integrity has been tampered with, textbooks have been graded down, standards have been allowed to deteriorate and no thought whatever has been paid to the youngsters' physical, spiritual and psychological needs...

...Why, one wonders, does all this colossal wasted energy go into making and then breaking human beings...

...Many have automobiles or scooters...

...Soon they grow up into helpful little members of the family—cooking, cleaning, minding the babies and generally being useful...

...Not youth but the lack of it is the problem here...

...It is at this age that, out of the wisdom borne of hard knocks, he begins to understand some of the things happening around him...

...Unlike teenagers in the West, there is no sense of uncertainty or unfulfillment among this set...

...India's politicians, who made steady and profitable use of the energy of the young during the days of the struggle against British imperialism, appear to have dropped them with the trite injunction to study and become useful citizens...

...They go to jam sessions Sunday mornings where Presley, Como and Ives are known and recognized names...

...Very neatly put indeed...

...For these young people have neither schooling, nor carefree hours in which to indulge in flights of fancy, nor indeed a pocket allowance with which to buy, well, anything...

...Every prospective consumer, he said, was also a prospective producer...

...It is only after a boy has found a job, got himself a wife and settled down in some small corner to be a useful member of society that his individuality to some extent comes into play...

...At this stage in her life, the female of the species, except in rare cases, completely vanishes within the four walls of the hut or room in which the young man lives with a dozen of his other dependents...

...So India is face to face with a vast majority of youths who have been, are being, and will continue to be denied everything but perhaps the bare means of subsistence...

...What people in the West experience as teenagers is not experienced by young Indians until they are somewhere between 20-30 years old...

...For all practical purposes, she just isn't there...

...To the young in India, there is no tomorrow...

...Both are conveniently tucked away for life...

...This state of affairs has not been deliberately brought about...

...The brief year or two before he is burdened with a family thus fills in for the youth he never had...

...Technologically, this rubble can be removed...

...Those who cannot shine on the silver screen do find jobs in cotton mills, on the wharves, in the offices and around the streets shining shoes...

...Neither the ruling Congress party nor indeed any of the half dozen opposition parties have a section for youth...

...If there is a Communist demonstration, he decides to join it or not to join it according to his own understanding of the situation or the persuasion of his friends...

...Politically, the chances of its removal appear rather slim...

...These are the displaced members of the country's youth...

...Each member of the gang knows that he is the son of so and so, that a rich and useful life lies ahead of him...

...And along with them the nation has a small group of "haves" who will be denied nothing, whose lives are predestined to run smoothly and comfortably along fur-lined paths...

...Still, such are the odds against Indian youth that, even at the hope of this slight chance, they continue to rush to Bombay...

...Many young men taste hard liquor and, out of sheer bravado, visit the city's red-light district...

...Even India's Communist party does not have a youth contingent...

...Their success so far, except marginally, has been ridiculously inadequate...

...The boy attains youth early, say at the age of 10...

...For the young and the old alike, beyond the horizon there is nothing but calamity...

...These are teenagers, indeed, who have somewhere along the line got out of the rut...

...At the age of 15 or thereabouts, the boy is thrust into a shop, a factory or an office...

...Those in the West who have been following the course of events in India with even the slightest interest are aware of some of the enormous failures India's rulers have piled up in a variety of areas...

...Somewhere around or after this last stage, these unfortunates could, I suppose, be called the nation's "youth" or even teenagers...

...A couple of years ago Prime Minister Nehru told me that he was not worried about the problems of a rising population...

...In the footsteps of a vast concourse of humanity submerged in the tough and losing battle for a meal a day, youth marches along, a dumb, hopeless, helpless herd...

...As in a game of snakes and ladders, there are various avenues open to the young by which they can make a desperate bid to break through the clouds of despair and make a mark in the world...

...Out of every million that take the trip, one succeeds...

...In desperation, he sheds his youth and tends to act grown-up...

...They go to nursery schools and kindergartens, enter "public schools," graduate into colleges, study philosophy, science or European languages, and cap it all with a few years education abroad...

...But the use of these terms in the accepted Western sense would be ludicrous...

...One supposes they have all realized—practical people that they are—that there is no youth, so why run after a mirage...

...During these two years, he probably joins a trade union, tries to learn a foreign language, and makes eyes at the office stenographer...

...India's population of 438 million is increasing by almost three per cent every year...

...If free education will be available for everyone in the 20th Five-Year plan, the enthusiasm of the school-less lad of today can hardly be fired by the prospect...

...Paradoxically, side by side with these two enormous groups of young Indians, the country also has a small group of young people who would be readily identifiable as teenagers in London, Paris or New York...

...And after these very short years he is to relapse into a child-making and childfeeding automaton...

...Many young women consider it de rigueur to let their virginity go hang...

...For anyone who watches the scene with sympathy and understanding, however, this cruel game that life is playing on India's young people is nothing if not heartbreaking...

...Thousands of teenagers thus make the often 2,000-mile-long journey to Bombay's film studios, and there hang around their adored stars and directors hoping one day to catch their eye...