Educated, jobless, connected—rebellion in the age of digital disillusionment

Youth aren’t just protesting power, they’re becoming the alternative—Dhaka to Kathmandu

Protesters march during a protest against the government’s decision to block several social media platforms, in Kathmandu on Tuesday. | TV Today Nepal | Screengrab | ANI

 There’s something in the monsoon smoke drifting from Nepal, a scent of rebellion that feels familiar yet fundamentally new. What unfolded in Kathmandu over the last two days feels uncannily global. A different country, a different flag, but the same mood of fury. Beneath every burning tyre and every broken barricade lies one common truth: the promises were a lie. The future sold, of everybody growing rich in a richly growing country, never arrived. Because the possibility of it never existed.

What’s happening in Nepal isn’t an isolated conflagration. It’s part of a slow-burning, subcontinental fire. It flickered in Colombo in 2022 when thousands occupied the presidential palace and chased the Rajapaksa brothers out of power. It exploded in Dhaka last year when jobless youth overthrew Sheikh Hasina’s long grip on power. It simmers in Pakistan, where young voters, influencers, and foot soldiers rallied behind Imran Khan, not always for who he was, but for what he represented: defiance. These are not copycat revolts. They are mirror uprisings: reflections of the same hunger, the same heartbreak, the same “enough is enough”.

For when the youth rise, history takes notes. And they become the alternative, the resistance, the threat.

 

Digital disillusionment

It has been seen before, but the world is different now.

In December 2010, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in a Tunisian town, and a single act of desperation lit the Arab world ablaze. Not just protests against despots, but a revolt against decades of stolen futures and state betrayal.

That same chant now echoes across South Asia, whether it’s Kathmandu, Dhaka, or Colombo. The language may change, but the fury is familiar: what use is sovereignty if it cannot feed, educate, or employ?

The difference, though, is that the Arab Spring belonged to a more innocent internet, when hope was high and social media platforms were still tools of liberation. What’s erupting across South Asia today comes after a decade of digital disillusionment. Propaganda has evolved, algorithms have been weaponised — but that only makes the lie starker out in the real world. These are uprisings born not of naïve optimism, but of lived betrayal.

No amount of nationalist chest-thumping can disguise economic rot. No “56-inch chest” or “Iron Lady” act can hold ground when the very youth mocked as nithalle — good-for-nothings — are the ones chasing power out the back door.

The strongmen of South Asia, like their Arab counterparts before them, have mastered the performance of patriotism. But even the best-scripted performances end. Not because of foreign enemies or political rivals, but because of the very youth dismissed as lazy, lost, or loud.

Here’s the thing about youth: they’re adoring until they’re not. One day they’re applauding your speeches; the next, they’re throwing shoes. History has always treated young people as both a resource and a risk — the prized demographic dividend until it refuses to stay polite.

From Tunisia to Tripoli, Tehran to Kathmandu, it’s the same alchemy: idealism meeting indignation, and the result is combustible. And when disillusionment sets in, they don’t retreat. They revolt with slogans, selfies, and stones.

Cities on the boil

At the heart of this churn is a generation educated into aspiration, but locked out of opportunity. Youth with degrees, dreams, but no office to report to.

In Nepal, unemployment hovered at 12.6 per cent in 2024, the latest peak in three decades of chronic joblessness. In Bangladesh, over 2.6 million people were actively seeking work as of September 2024. Even Sri Lanka’s protests in 2022, sparked by fuel and food shortages, soon drew in the unemployed, the overqualified, the underpaid.

This is a generation raised on the gospel of merit but haunted by its betrayal. Their parents came of age during liberalisation, when the market opened, jobs multiplied, and private success was sold as public progress. That wealth, however uneven, fuelled a singular family dream: get a degree, get a job, get ahead. Degrees arrived. Jobs did not. The bargain was broken.

But what we are seeing isn’t history on loop. The fury may be familiar, but its form is not. Today’s uprisings don’t wait for names or leaders. They flare up unplanned and unstoppable. One moment there’s a government blackout on Instagram; the next, there’s a nationwide street storm.

Leaderless but not lost, spontaneous but not incoherent, the rebellion feels less like a revolution and more like a digital glitch in the matrix that no state can debug. And it becomes not just a movement, but a mood — agile, angry, and now allergic to bullshit.

Also, when this generation revolts, they don’t retreat to the margins. They take over the capital, quite literally. Colombo, Dhaka, Kathmandu: cities where aspiration collides with alienation, where gated condos overlook gutted futures. These cities are pressure cookers, filling with the rage of three tribes of upheaval: the jobless graduate, the working poor, and the invisible underclass. When it all explodes, the city becomes a stage—everything from metro stations to malls turns into performance spaces. A theatre of rage.

 

When tables turn at broadband speed

The age of globalisation promised mobility, merit, modernity. What it left behind is a shared ache. Disillusionment has gone transnational. It is ambient. It spreads not through ideology, but through images.

A flickering livestream from Kathmandu can resonate in Brooklyn. A masked protester in Dhaka could just as well be a college kid in London. The betrayal feels global because the dream was sold globally. Now disappointment is distributed, decentralised, and downloadable.

This isn’t mimicry, it is resonance. And it travels faster than politics. A cheap laptop and a cracked phone can now carry more power than a politician’s megaphone. In every café and roadside stall, there is a device that records, edits, streams and, when the time becomes despairing, also ignites.

Politics weaponised technology for propaganda; the young now wield it to ask what happened to those promises. You can’t shut them down without shutting down the very platforms your economy depends on. Autocrats have learned the hard way: networks outlast hierarchies. Every lie invites a screenshot, every act of censorship becomes a meme. The more they try to control the story, the faster it escapes.

In the early 20th century, the car, the telephone, and cinema disrupted society and redefined the individual. Today, the disruption happens at broadband speed, and it’s everywhere.

So no, what’s happening in Kathmandu is not just another protest. It is a generational verdict sweeping across South Asia, one uprising at a time. When the young stop waiting, they don’t just demand change. They become the alternative — to the government, to the strongman clinging to power.

Shruti Vyas is a journalist based in New Delhi. She writes on politics, international relations and current affairs. Views are personal.

(Edited by Asavari Singh)