Nibir Deka

One of my favourite speeches from history is Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.” Sometimes a civilisation’s most powerful dream is simply the promise that if you work hard enough, your children will live slightly better than you did.

America had one. Get a decent job. Marry. Buy a house somewhere in the suburbs. Send your children to the neighbourhood school. Save for college. Grow old on a lawn that you spent thirty years complaining about mowing.

The 2008 financial crisis did enormous damage to that imagination. Housing became increasingly difficult for younger Americans to afford. In 2024, only 4.06 million existing homes were sold in the United States, the lowest annual figure since 1995. The house with the white fence still exists. It is simply becoming harder to enter it.

We had our own version of this dream in India.

And if you grew up in a middle-class family in a Tier-2 or Tier-3 city like Guwahati, you probably know the script. Your parents moved away from the joint family or eventually wanted to. They saved money. Bought a small piece of land somewhere that everyone complained was “too far from the city.” Twenty years later, the city arrived there anyway.

They built a house. But their greatest investment was rarely the house. It was you. Send the child to the best school we can afford. Tuition after school. Science if the marks permit it. Engineering, medicine or a Master’s from a respectable university.

Then there were broadly two endings to the story. A government job through a competitive examination. Or an MNC job somewhere in Delhi, Bangalore, Gurgaon or Mumbai. That was the Indian middle-class dream. Study well, and you will get a good job. The problem is that the sentence no longer ends so neatly.

Government employment remains one of the great aspirations of small-town India, but no government can possibly provide a government job to every graduate entering the labour market. The demographic dividend is simply too large. So thousands of young people spend their twenties preparing for competitive examinations where the vacancies are limited, and the applicants seem infinite.

Some eventually take Grade III jobs despite having Master’s degrees from excellent universities. There is nothing undignified about those jobs. The tragedy lies elsewhere. You were educated to expect that every additional degree would take you another floor upwards. Then one day you discover that the elevator isn’t working.

The private-sector dream isn’t looking particularly romantic either. Move to Bengaluru. Move to Gurgaon. Move to Mumbai. Get the corporate job. Then spend half your salary on rent, another portion getting to the office, order dinner because you returned too exhausted to cook, and spend Sunday wondering why exactly you moved 2,000 kilometres away from home.

COVID accelerated another change. People came back. And many discovered that they actually liked being back. The parents were here. Friends were here. The air was familiar. Life was cheaper. The fish tasted better.

Then Monday arrived. Where are the jobs?

India’s startup economy has created extraordinary wealth and opportunity, but much of that ecosystem remains concentrated around a few metropolitan centres. What the digital economy has delivered very efficiently to many Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities is something else.

The gig economy.

A young man with a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree rides through Guwahati delivering food, groceries or passengers. After petrol, maintenance and platform economics, ₹500 can sometimes make it a good day. There is dignity in every honest day’s work. But we should stop using the language of dignity to avoid asking uncomfortable economic questions.

If someone spends eighteen or twenty years inside an education system and the economy’s most readily available answer for him is to ride a motorcycle for twelve hours, perhaps the problem isn’t the motorcycle. Perhaps something between education and the economy has stopped speaking to each other. And that is why I find this generation fascinating.

They are frightened of sacrificing six years of their twenties preparing for a government examination they may never clear. They are equally unconvinced about spending those years in a metropolitan city on an entry-level salary that gives them neither savings nor a particularly enjoyable life.

Because their schools prepared them for a world that was already disappearing. Anyone who passed through school until fairly recently remembers the formula.

Study hard. Get good marks. Get a degree. Get a job. The successful senior invited to school was usually the civil servant. Occasionally the doctor, engineer or corporate executive. Nobody invited the 26-year-old who built a small logistics company.

Nobody explained how a local brand becomes profitable. Nobody taught you how a freelancer finds clients in another country. Nobody told you that one day somebody sitting in Guwahati could edit videos for a company in London without ever leaving his bedroom.

Then 4G arrived. And quietly, the phone offered young India an alternative economy.

Suddenly a student could become a YouTuber. Someone could build a small social-media agency. A photographer could find clients through Instagram. A teacher could sell classes online. A designer could freelance. Someone could make money through affiliate marketing, digital consulting, online tutoring or a thousand micro-businesses that our textbooks never prepared us to understand. Hence, you see a brand like Little Box with a founder from Guwahati and a gin from Cherrapunji telling a story like no other.

Even stock-market participation entered the vocabulary of families where “share market” was once spoken with roughly the same confidence as horse racing. Then the parents joined. Mothers started cooking channels. Fathers started gardening pages. Small businessmen discovered reels.

The same family that once shouted, “Phone tu rakha!” suddenly started asking why yesterday’s video received fewer views. There is something extraordinary about this democratisation. There is also something dangerous. Because the internet didn’t merely tell young people that they could create value.

It told them that attention itself had value. And when somebody from a small town sees another person earning in one month what an entry-level job might pay in a year because one video went viral, the incentives begin changing. So someone performs a stunt. Someone drives dangerously. Someone creates a fake controversy. Someone humiliates another person for a reaction video. Someone discovers that anger gets more views than intelligence.

When the conventional economy isn’t offering enough opportunities, and the attention economy tells you that stupidity can occasionally be monetised, stupidity becomes a business model. I don’t blame the young person entirely. We gave him a smartphone, cheap internet and an algorithm capable of reaching fifty million people. We forgot to give him an economic imagination for what to do with it.

And this is where I think our education system has fallen dangerously behind. Content creation shouldn’t merely mean teaching children how to become influencers. That would be an equally ridiculous destination. Content is becoming infrastructure for business.

China seems to have understood this more aggressively. Its enormous livestream-commerce and short-video ecosystem increasingly connects creators, factories, local products and sellers. The person holding the camera isn’t necessarily selling himself as the product. Very often, the content is constructing a story around the product, the factory, the farm, the town or the business.

That distinction matters. A camera can create an influencer. But it can also create a market.

Imagine teaching a young person in Assam not merely how to make a reel, but how to use storytelling to sell Assam tea directly to customers. How to build a digital market around Muga. How to make a small furniture workshop discoverable nationally. How to turn a homestay into a brand. How to take a family business that has existed for forty years and give it customers in places its founder has never visited.

Then content creation stops being an escape from the economy. It becomes part of the productive economy. Because converting millions of young people in India’s smaller cities into delivery partners and self-employed content creators cannot be the final answer.

Perhaps that is what worries me most about the death of the old middle-class dream. Not that it died. Dreams always die when economies change. The problem is that nobody has shown this generation another one. And we badly need another Martin Luther King to show us the road.

Note – Content is infrastructure for your business, and community will be the answer to acquire the next generation of people who will be interested in your business or personal brand. As such, we created The Visual Poets