Indian millennials are too traditional to feel free, and too modern to feel at home

Graphics by Prajna Ghosh | ThePrint

Everyone is so busy making commentary on India’s Gen Z and analysing them that millennials and their struggles have been forgotten.

I am a millennial, and let me tell you: there are more of us. We grew up at the hinge of centuries and have since been waiting for life to begin, though we have already lived so much of it. Waiting for stability, for certainty, for something to move the proverbial needle forward. We are suspended in a long, humming pause between what was promised and what arrived. We are stuck in a liminal plane, not unlike the antechambers of hell Dante once imagined. 

Childhood was simple. Watching Rangoli on Sunday mornings on Doordarshan, eating cold aloo paranthas from steel tiffins, playing antakshari with grandparents on summer afternoons when the power went out, and memorising landline numbers in our spare time. Our parents spoke in absolutes: “Padh lo, naukri mil jaayegi; naukri mil jaayegi, zindagi set ho jaayegi.” Study hard, get a job, and life will fall into place. 

The in-between children

Life, we were told, was a straight line. But somewhere between Orkut scraps and Instagram timelines, between Siti cable’s staccato TV transmission and unlimited data, the ground shifted beneath us. We were told that in India, the opportunity to shine was exponential, especially post-liberalisation. That we could be anything. But no one told us that the ladders would be overcrowded, and that the view from the middle would be neither here nor there.

We are not as rooted as our parents, who stayed in one city, one job, one marriage, one way of being. And we are not as unburdened as those who came after us, fluent in reinvention, unafraid to quit, to pivot, to be undefined. We are the in-between children—too traditional to feel free, too modern to feel at home.

Our twenties were spent learning to write emails that sounded confident while our insides trembled. “Per my last mail”. “Just circling back”. We moved cities, carrying steel trunks and dreams. First salaries felt unreal—numbers in an SMS that disappeared quickly into EMIs and family responsibilities. We learned to send money home before buying ourselves new shoes, and learned guilt as a second language. We learned to smile in open offices with glass walls, while secretly updating résumés at night. And every scroll of social media brought a reminder: someone else had figured it out. Someone else was married, promoted, migrated, and glowing.

At family gatherings, we became objects of opprobrium. What are you doing with your life? When are you getting married? Our answers grew longer, more careful. We spoke of plans and of transitions. Inside, we carried the quiet shame of not having arrived at a destination that no one clearly defined.

Love, too, became liminal. We fell in love on chats that stretched past midnight and on WhatsApp ticks turning blue like small, electric heartbeats. We loved across cities, across castes, across expectations, and across countries. Sometimes, we froze at the threshold of “log kya kahenge”. What will people say? Some of us fought against the rules. Some of us folded. Some of us still think of a name when a certain song plays on the radio during a late-night cab ride home.

Healing, hustling, becoming

We are the generation that learned adulthood without a map. We are tired in a way sleep can’t fix. Tired of being adaptable. Tired of being resilient. Tired of being told we are lucky, lucky to have choice, lucky to have freedom, when choice itself feels like a maze with no exit signs. We are tired of turning ourselves into projects, of constantly upgrading, healing, hustling, becoming. Our parents don’t understand our exhaustion. We are not digging wells or surviving wars, they remind us. But, we are tired—bone-deep. 

And yet. There is something achingly tender about us. We know how to hold contradictions. We remember a slower world and dream of a fairer one. We remember a world before constant comparison. We are liminal because we had to be.

Simply put, we are the bridge generation, holding our parents’ faith in permanence and our own understanding in a suspended reality. We are learning, slowly, that life may never “settle”, and that maybe it doesn’t have to. That love can exist without marriage, and that worth can exist without titles. Sometimes, late at night, when the city hums like an old dial-up modem and the blue light of our phones reflects on us, we grieve the selves we might have been in a simpler world. And then we get up the next morning and try again, sending job applications, attending weddings, calling home, loving anyway.

We are the pause between breaths and the dusk before the lamps are lit. We are learning, slowly, painfully, that it is okay to be unfinished. That life is not tidy, and that meaning can exist even without milestones neatly ticked off. One day, perhaps, this waiting will make sense. Perhaps we will look back and realise that this in-between was not a failure of arrival, but a deeper education in empathy and humanity. And perhaps one day, history will judge us, the millennials, kindly.

Pranav Jain is an IPS (P) officer and a columnist. Views are personal.

(Edited by Ratan Priya)