Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World

180 Pages·2018·0.76 MB·English

by  Snigdha Poonam

SNIGDHA POONAM

DREAMERS
How Young Indians Are Changing Their World
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
PART I: ‘THERE IS NO PLAN B’
1: The Click-Baiter
2: The English Man
3: The Fixer
PART II: ‘I AM READY FOR A FIGHT’
4: The Angry Young Men
5: The Angry Young Woman
PART III: ‘NOTHING IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE’
6: The Star
7: The Scammer
Epilogue
References
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Advance Praise for Dreamers
‘“Demographic dividend”, “aspirational India”, “social media generation”:
every catch-phrase, sound bite and cliché about contemporary India is brought
to terrifying, hilarious life in Dreamers, Snigdha Poonam’s magnificent deep
dive into the lives of India’s hungry, ambitious millennials. Even as she brings
to raging life their self-help routines, the swagger of their Spoken English and
the scams that power their dreams, she shows us, almost in passing, the
bedazzled desperation that Modi and Adityanath rode to power. This is that
rare work: a piece of reportage that names a generation and explains the world
that it made. Both cold-eyed and compassionate, Dreamers is an important
book and Snigdha Poonam is a terrific writer’—Mukul Kesavan
‘Snigdha Poonam offers an enlightening and powerful examination into the
absorbing world of India’s youth, their unique complexities, aspirations, and
ambitions in the twenty-first century. Rich in detail and engagingly crafted,
Dreamers is a lively and compelling read’—Shashi Tharoor, author of
Inglorious Empire
‘Diligently reported and crisply written, Dreamers is an eye-opening guide to
India’s troubled present—and future. No recent book has so astutely charted
the treacherous Indian gap between extravagant illusion and grim reality’—
Pankaj Mishra
‘Snigdha takes us on a roller-coaster ride through the hungry, hallucinatory
world of India’s angry millennials: students, fixers, scamsters and models
high on political steroids, English language and the Net, where poop becomes
a scoop’—Mrinal Pande
‘A brilliant dive into the seething psyche of India’s small-town youth: a
mayhem of sexuality, sentimentality and insatiable hunger for success—at
whatever price. Be afraid’—Sunil Khilnani
‘A clever, fresh, and honest book about one of the great unknowns—and one
of the most important topics—of the developing world: the lives, aspirations,
disappointments and achievements of India’s young people’—Jason Burke
For my parents
PART I: ‘There Is No Plan B’
1
The Click-Baiter
IT MIGHT BE any other editorial meeting, in any of a million new clickbait
start-ups: a set of editors huddled around a table to discuss what news and
gossip to feed their audience next. The process is quick and brutal. Ideas are
thrown around like bids on a trading floor:
Why your best friend is your true love, just like Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher.
This is what you need to know about Amanda—Justin Bieber’s new girlfriend.
How your face would look if you survived a car crash.
Fifteen times Donald Trump was trolled hilariously.
Fifteen minutes is all it takes the team to go over the whole range of
American obsessions, from Kardashians to belly fat, from sex confessions to
life hacks; and fifteen seconds is the average time they spend making a
decision. Poor Amanda is peremptorily ditched for Victoria Beckham, who
has just kicked up a parenting scandal by posting a photo on Instagram in
which she is kissing one of her children. The editors opt for a bold stand, and
argue the former Spice Girl did nothing wrong. Or, as the published article
will later put it, ‘This is why kissing your kids on the lips is not a bad idea.’
They have a reason for choosing the story: ‘Child kissing is trending in the
US,’ a young woman wearing black eyeshadow informs the room. The car
crash idea is tweaked to imagine the impact of two car crashes on someone’s
face at once. Everyone agrees it should only be a visual story. Americans,
apparently, simply adore accident horror. Kim Kardashian loses out to Kylie
Jenner. Another enterprising young woman volunteers a DIY experiment as
research for the story ‘How to get lips like Kylie Jenner without going under
the knife’. (‘Kylie Jenner lip challenge’ is also, apparently, trending.) No
changes to the last item—Donald Trump is, of course, always hot. Ideas are
approved not because of their news value but on account of how they appeal
to base emotions. And in this quarter of an hour, these ten youngsters have
tapped into the whole range of American emotional triggers: what excites
Americans, what terrifies them, what makes them sad, and what makes them
curious.
This isn’t an editorial meeting somewhere in the US. Everyone here is less
than twenty-three years old, and they’re perched in an all-glass office in a
shopping mall in Indore, a medium-sized city in central India. They’re
deciding, a few hours before America wakes up, what it will read when it
does.
They are hardly ever wrong—or so say the numbers. Millions of people
visit their website, WittyFeed, every day. Of them, 80 per cent are foreigners
and half these people are from the US. WittyFeed is one of the world’s
fastest-growing content farms; over a billion people follow it on Facebook
alone. The only website of its kind visited by more people is BuzzFeed, the
world leader in viral content. Currently valued at only 30 million dollars,
WittyFeed is giving itself a couple of years to beat BuzzFeed. That’s not its
ultimate goal, though. What the plucky youngsters who run it want to do is to
build the world’s largest media company (‘bigger than BBC, CNN’). How do
they hope to do it? By following their maxim: ‘It’s emotion that goes viral.’
Few people have heard of WittyFeed, even in India. The only reason I’m
here is because I noticed its crazy numbers: 82 million monthly visits, 1.5
billion page views, 170 million users, 4.2 million likes on Facebook.
WittyFeed is news by the same parameter that it uses to define news: the
WTF factor. How can a bunch of kids in a small Indian town who have never
seen the world dream of ruling it by simply getting the internet better than
anyone else?
In May 2016, I went to Indore to decide for myself if WittyFeed could
indeed become the biggest media company in the world. Whether or not I
found an answer to that question, I would at least get to hang out with a bunch
of Indians who live in the internet. Flying in from Delhi, Indore looks small
along every dimension: the width of its roads, the height of its buildings, the
price of one night’s stay at a mid-scale hotel. The signs of aspiration are all
there, however. Cool coffee shops are coming up on cow-populated lanes;
rock concerts are advertised on billboards; and youngsters wander its streets
in Instagram-ready outfits.
But Indore’s new spirit of enterprise peaks in WittyFeed’s 10,000-square-
foot office on the ninth floor of the town’s tallest commercial tower. It is
decorated in a wide-eyed image of Silicon Valley. The walls are a canvas for
everything central to the company’s self-image, from an elaborate graphic
illustration of WittyFeed’s journey to icons of their favourite social media
companies—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and Snapchat—to the
collage of a ‘start-up alphabet’ (creativity, crazy, courage …). Between these
colourful walls, the open-plan office is a window into the company’s hopeful,
global soul: exposed brick and espresso machine, beanbags and a ping-pong
table, a corner where the employees can wind down and an enclosure where
they can work out. The office is designed such that, if you’re not staring into
your slim laptop, you’re forced to look at something inspirational. Something
that’s meant to make an employee think as big, and American, as possible. It
could be the blown-up face of a celebrity—Marilyn Monroe, perhaps, or
Madonna. It could be nuggets of espresso-shot motivation—‘99.9 per cent is
not 100 per cent’ or ‘Set Goal. Reach. Repeat’. Or it could be a triptych of the
most inspiring Americans according to WittyFeed—Abraham Lincoln, Steve
Jobs and Elon Musk. Should they be hit by self-doubt amid this architecture
of inspiration, all they have to do is stand outside the office of the company’s
CEO and look at the image of an enormous Aladdin voicing the words that
power millions of dreams across India every day: ‘The universe is a genie …
it always says, “your wish is my command’’.’ The CEO’s office has a name:
Winterfell. So do the bathrooms: the men’s is called ‘Khal’ and the women’s
‘Khaleesi’. Like the violent medieval world of Game of Thrones, WittyFeed
runs on the hunger for power, and for other people’s territory.
The twenty-something workforce live together in a couple of large
bungalows, are told to regard each other as brothers and sisters, and reach out
to the Chief Content Officer, or CCO, if they are out of shampoo or
toothpaste. To enter the world of WittyFeed, they must leave their past at the
door. It feels almost like a cult designed by millennials, for millennials: The
chance of getting in goes up the less of a past they have to begin with. The
conditions are stated clearly to anyone who wants to work at WittyFeed. This
must be their first job, and they must want it bad. The company actually
prefers people with poor work experience and education. What it wants from
a candidate in an interview—which can stretch over a whole day—is the
answer to a question it considers central to their eligibility: Who are you? The
answer can be a monologue or a manic dance around the room; the second
may win more points.
Most young Indians who take that interview will have been asked that
question for the first time. It isn’t something that young people in India have
ever been encouraged to ask: Who are you? In a society where who you are—
caste, class, region, religion—is decided for you long before you are born,
‘wokeness’ is a luxury. This is the defining difference between this generation
of Indians, and most of those that have come before.
Applicants put themselves through this existential interrogation because
they are desperate for a job and this is their only chance. Of the first three
WittyFeed employees I met in Indore, two had recently lost their fathers and
found themselves supporting their entire family. Fitting into WittyFeed’s
world is an experience most of them described to me as strange but life-
changing. A week at the company is all it takes them to go from not knowing
anything about the world to deciding what the world should know. It is not
easy. You don’t just wake up and write a definitive cure for American break-
up blues if you are an eighteen-year-old girl in Indore who has never been on
a date. You start by learning how to think like the audience you want to reach:
an American kid who wants an ‘AI butler like Iron Man’s Jarvis’, or a hipster
looking for an app that will allow him to ‘teabag’ American politicians, or a
Tinder user who wants to master the art of ‘bread-crumbing’—flirty yet non-
committal texts. And you then get into the spirit—or the spirit gets into you.
Every thought in your head is a potential idea for a viral post; it flashes before
your eyes complete with the number of people who are likely to click on it. If
you’re good, some of them come attached with a thumbnail image.
Sometimes you think you are going crazy; then you look around and no one
appears any saner.
‘One day Parveen bhaiyya—the CCO—was on a flight back to Indore from
somewhere. He was using the loo when an idea came to him: Where does
your poop go in an aeroplane? The moment he was back, he came over and
shared the idea with us. We published a story around it the same day. It went
super viral. 315,000 views. The idea was copied across the content industry.’
Lavanya Srivastav is showing me around the office. We have just come out of
the editorial meeting and everyone’s on it. Someone in ‘content’ is tracking
Selena Gomez on Instagram, someone in ‘tech’ is building a hack to beat
Facebook’s audience limit, and someone in ‘engagement’ is updating a list of
topics likely to trend over the next two hours. In every corner of the office, a
screen is flashing the number of people on the website at any second. ‘Nine
thousand people now,’ says Srivastav, with a flick of her shoulder in the
direction of a screen.
Srivastav looks even younger than she is: chubby, curly-haired, twinkly-
eyed. She joined WittyFeed two years ago, when she was twenty. ‘They didn’t
ask me what I had done before. They asked me to sing. It was hard to sing in
front of strangers, but I went along with the moment.’ She needed the job.
‘When my father died, it was hard for my mother to return to work because of
her age. I have a little sister. I was in college in our home town in Gujarat, but
I started looking for a job. One day I came to know there is a start-up in
Indore that was hiring.’ Srivastav’s now the chief of content at WittyFeed. She
began her writing career with a post on relationship advice. ‘At first I didn’t
know what to say. You can’t just write something like that. You have to be
genuine. I started digging deep within myself, reading up. It was very
important to put sentiment in such a piece. With time, we found our tone.
Now we know how to write stories of great transformation. Say, someone
who has a scar but is living her life. Ladies out there who we are trying to
reach get inspired by these stories.’
She has helped contribute several other categories to WittyFeed’s content
mix over the two years: cats, beards, OMG. Her OMG instinct is seldom off:
It’s where she slotted the poop story. Written by WittyFeed’s resident ‘poop
expert’, ‘What Happens to Your Poop in an Airplane Toilet Will Leave You
Surprised’ swiftly got to half a million views. The thumbnail shows a pair of
legs in front of a toilet seat, red panties pulled down to its knees. Her first
viral story—a photo puzzle titled ‘A Husband Divorced His Wife after
Looking Closer at this Picture’—was about a guy who comes home to find a
man hiding under his wife’s bed. Over 3 million people have viewed it so far.
Her second viral story featured a lip-sync battle between Dwayne Johnson
and Taylor Swift. ‘It was shared by George Takei, of Star Trek. Suddenly,
there were 50,000 people on the website. I was so thrilled. People were liking
it, sharing it, commenting on it. That’s when I knew, you know, that there is
something right about what I do.’ Her faith in the power of sharing validated,
Srivastav threw herself into the WittyFeed life. Her mother and sister moved
to Indore to live with her in a rented house. They have given up wondering
about her unusual lifestyle. ‘You are feeding American curiosity. There is
always a story to do at three in the morning. You can’t come into office at ten
and do it; virality doesn’t work like that.’
With every day at her job, she says she gets better at relating to her
audience, no matter how different their world is from hers. ‘I wrote a DIY
story on how to make a swimming pool in your garden. Title—we kept it very
relatable—“This Man Couldn’t Afford a Swimming Pool but What He Did
Next Is Truly Fantastic”. It went viral. We have other ways. The moment you
tell someone you are doing something wrong, automatically they will want to
know. My story “The Way You Brush Your Teeth Is Wrong and You Don’t
Even Know about It!” got 2 million views. After the success of the airline
poop story, we started to do a lot of “ever wondered” stories. “Ever Wondered
What Female Astronauts Do When They Get Periods in Space?” One of our
writers explained.’
Not every story hits a million views, but they are supposed to reach a
minimum of 100,000. This is why so few survive the editorial wringer. ‘You
know the moment when you are scrolling through your Facebook feed, going
through links without paying much attention, and then suddenly you scroll
past something, and it makes you so curious you scroll back to click on the
link—that’s the kind of pull we put in our content. It should force you to click
on it.’ No law of clickbait science is overlooked. ‘We have a system where we
track every keyword that is important for virality—terrifying, shocking,
inspirational.’
With every passing minute of our conversation, Srivastav’s tone becomes
more authoritative. She still looks like a teenager, but one who talks like a
Silicon Valley boss. ‘Together we control 1 million reach on Facebook alone
through 50,000 pages as affiliates—popular pages on nail art, relationships,
health and lifestyle. They should have at least 40,000 followers. They share
our posts, we share revenue with them based on how many clicks they
enabled. Ninety per cent of our traffic comes from Facebook. Usually, Indian