It was a sight both unsettling and clarifying. On a blistering afternoon, heavy with humidity, a group of boys and mothers stood silently along a pavement—empty cans, dented buckets, plastic jugs at their feet—waiting for the water tanker. There was no commotion, no conversation, just a strange stillness that comes not from discipline, but from resignation. Just heads bowed to their phones scrolling, swiping, escaping into lives more curated and colourful than their own.
“Paani nahin hai, naukri nahin hai… par phone hai. Aur us par timepass karne ke liye waqt hi waqt,” I muttered. No water, no job, but there’s a phone and endless time to kill on it.
This is the new Bharat: addicted, online, and strangely calm to its quiet collapse.
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Influence over income
In New India, Indians are reportedly spending an average of five hours daily on their phones, primarily on social media, gaming, and video streaming. And it isn’t leisure anymore. It’s identity. It’s economy. The ambition today, whether it’s a toddler or young adult, isn’t to become a civil servant, doctor, engineer, or teacher. It is to go viral.
In a country where unemployment is at a historic high, the national anxiety isn’t about jobs — it’s about reach. Aspirations have shifted from employment to engagement, from careers to content. It’s no longer about building a life, but building a following, to trend. As job creation stagnates, the generation has turned to visibility for validation. Today’s youth wants views, likes, and subscribers. Not power, but popularity. Not contribution, but clout. Not nation-building, but narrative-building.
Even UPSC aspirants, once held up as the embodiment of India’s intellectual grit, are now daily vloggers. “A day in my life as a UPSC student” videos include 5 am alarms, lemon water, reading The Hindu, and skincare routines. If the exam fails, the breakfast still gets monetised. Even ambition now comes with a referral code. This is not satire — it’s economy.
Dadis and Nanis have become wellness influencers with their nuskas, guided by tech-savvy grandchildren. Turmeric milk, cold-pressed oil, chanting for clear skin. They’re charming, wholesome, algorithmically gold. Even the at-home mother is no longer invisible. She is now the home aesthetic queen. Her hair-wash day is edited like a film trailer. Her tadka is content. Her candle-lit dinner with her husband is a captioned moment of gratitude. She’s a “momfluencer”.
Middle-aged men once chasing sarkari naukris now host podcasts. Even rickshaw pullers might run a YouTube channel. Because in today’s India, if you can’t be employed, you can still be seen.
And crucially, these aren’t just hobbyists or bored teens. They’re professionals — doctors, consultants, coders, bankers, journalists. The digital hustle is mainstream. So mainstream, in fact, that influencers now have their own tax bracket. The government may not know how to generate jobs, but it knows how to tax performance.
Today, everyone’s online, everyone’s performing. This is no longer just content. It’s a belief system. One reel at a time.
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A new culture of distraction
Meanwhile, society frets about sanskars — values lost, respect eroded. But sanskars haven’t disappeared; they have simply been outsourced to the algorithm.
Today’s unemployed are not idle. They’re uploading. Hustling to go viral. Performing for an audience they can’t see, but desperately want to impress.
Eleven years on, the government that came riding on hope and the promise of “newness” has certainly delivered something new — not progress, but a shift. A new mood. A new vocabulary. A culture where words like optics, reach, and influence matter more than truth, clarity, or consequence.
Bharat today is not a nation of thinkers or builders. It is a stage where the applause is silent, the imagined audience endless.
That moment on the pavement—young boys and mothers, parched, waiting for water that may never arrive, eyes locked on their phones—wasn’t unusual. That’s the unsettling part. There was no protest, no urgency. No jobs, no outrage. Just stillness. And brightly lit screens.
The new Bharat is fully online, curated and restless to perform. In it, ambition doesn’t rise. It refreshes. The quiet dignity of waiting for something better has been replaced by the anxious thrill of being seen. And yet, in this constant thrum of likes and loops, you can feel it — a subtle corrosion. Not of economy, but of imagination. Not of politics, but of purpose.
So I leave you, too, in the end, to wonder — when the feed goes quiet, when the likes stop coming, when the flicker fades from the screen and the noise dissolves into silence, what will any of us do? When there is no scroll to chase, no audience to perform for, no curated life to escape into — what will remain of us? And more importantly, what will we return to?
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)