Snigdha Poonam\u2019s book, \u2018Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World\u2019, begins with a profile of Vinay Singhal, the founder of WittyFeed, a website famous for its curiosity-arousing, clickbait articles. I had no idea that WittyFeed \u2013 a website that seems to be aimed at a primarily western (read: American) audience \u2013 was founded at and is being run from Indore in Madhya Pradesh! Singhal, originally from \u201ca small village in Haryana\u201d and despite not having \u201cencountered English before leaving their village\u201d set up WittyFeed, \u201cone of the world\u2019s fastest growing content farms\u201d, a website visited by millions, of which \u201c80 per cent are foreigners and half [those] people are from the US\u201d\u2014all from \u201can all-glass office in a shopping mall in Indore\u201d! This is what Poonam\u2019s book is all about\u2014stories of young people from north India \u2013 mainly Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand \u2013 who are not only dreaming seemingly impossible dreams but also, in some cases, turning those dreams into reality. The lead subjects in four out of seven chapters are based in Poonam\u2019s hometown, Ranchi: the proprietor of a spoken English class, a stringer-turned-proprietor of a Pragya Kendra (a kiosk authorised by the government of Jharkhand to provide certain services to people on behalf of the government), a budding politician working with the BJP, and a winner of the Mr. Jharkhand pageant.<\/p>\n
The only story about a woman is of Richa Singh, the first woman to become the president of the students\u2019 union of Allahabad University who achieved this feat in two weeks! In the ultra-masculine political scene of Allahabad, men, \u201conce they are done with college politics\u201d, \u201cjoin either full-time crime or the state assembly\u201d. That is why, in the 127 years of Allahabad University, \u201c[there] is a reason\u2026why no woman had dared to stand for the president of the students\u2019 union.\u201d Singh started with reclaiming the space for women in the campus \u201cwhere they came with their heads bowed and left\u2026with their heads bowed\u201d. As the president of the students\u2019 union, she resisted violent attempts by the ABVP and stopped Yogi Adityanath, two years before he became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, from entering the campus of Allahabad University.<\/p>\n
What strikes immediately about these stories is the masculinity. Apart from a sense of responsibility that comes from being a man in India, there is the cockiness and that certain vulnerability associates with men. Poonam writes about her subjects: \u201cEveryone I followed knew exactly what I was doing; not one of them was surprised at the fact of being chosen. Long before I showed up with a notebook and pen, they had known that someday someone would.\u201d Vikas Thakur, who worked in the BJP\u2019s IT cell in Ranchi, tries to impress Poonam with the several acts of rowdiness that he had performed \u2013 \u201cmaar-peet<\/em>, gundagardi<\/em>\u2026contacts in the local police station\u201d \u2013 to which Poonam wonders: \u201cI didn\u2019t always know how to react to these heroic stories young men told me about themselves.\u201d The story on the cow protection army of Haryana is insightful in many ways. For one, I came to know that the members of the cow protection army were not dependent only on their job as protectors of cows\u2014they also had day jobs. Sachin Ahuja, one of the gau rakshaks, sold insurance schemes from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., pumped iron from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., and, 9 p.m. onwards, \u201che [responded] to the call of the cow mother.\u201d Despite their claims of protecting Indian culture, one insecurity these men had was regarding women. Arjun Kumar, a 22-year-old man from Meerut and a member of the Bajrang Dal that kept young men and women from meeting one another on Valentine\u2019s Day, \u201c[was] not sure if he [would] find a job he\u2019d like or find a girl who\u2019d like him.\u201d Ahuja, the gau rakshak, \u201c[knew] better than to think he [had] any chances [with women].\u201d In a show of emotions that is characteristically male, men like Santosh Thakur, the motivational speaker, and Pankaj Prasad, the stringer-turned-Pragya Kendra operator, despite earning enough money that enabled them to buy SUVs, still preserved their bicycles from their days as strugglers. For Prasad, \u201c[the] point of the relic [the bicycle] was to remind his visitors of the distance he [had] travelled in his life\u201d.<\/p>\n Some common factors binding most of the men Poonam interviewed were a dislike for the Congress Party and an admiration for Narendra Modi, and internet and social media. It was understood if the Hindu radicals sang paeans for Modi, but even Singhal \u201c[saw] hope in\u2026Modi\u2026[the] tech-savvy strongman [had] everything a man like Singhal [wanted] in a leader.\u201d Men like Singhal, Prasad, Thakur, and the workers at call centres in Delhi and other places built their careers on internet and technology. Poonam kept track of most of her subjects using their profiles on social media. Azhar Khan, the Mr. Jharkhand winner from Ranchi, runs away to Mumbai and finds support there from his several followers on Facebook.<\/p>\n Poonam\u2019s writing is rich in observation and humour. She mentions the white towel which is a symbol of authority in a sarkari<\/em> office in north India. Prasad, \u201c[to] mark his elevated status [as an operator of a Pragya Kendra]\u2026covered his revolving chair with a white towel\u201d. Also, Poonam provides a closure to the stories of her subjects \u2013 especially those from Ranchi \u2013 by following up on them over months. Like, she tells Khan\u2019s story from when he became Mr. Jharkhand in 2014 through when he planned to open an event company in Ranchi to when he is struggling \u201cin the middle of a suburban slum in Mumbai\u201d in 2016, and Singh\u2019s story from being an independent candidate to contest the students\u2019 union election to becoming a member of the Samajwadi Party. In Allahabad University, Poonam finds humour in \u201ca middle-aged Brahmin [man] who rarely opened his mouth for fear of disturbing the position of the paan he was chewing.\u201d Poonam finds humour even in the troubles she took to gather her stories. At Allahabad University, while covering Singh\u2019s victory, she survived a bomb explosion. \u201cLike everybody there, I [ran] for my life, except I [didn\u2019t] know where to go. By the time I [found] Singh in the stampede, I [knew] I [was] done with Allahabad.\u201d While doing the story on cyber fraud in call centres, Poonam went undercover as a job aspirant, \u201c[interviewing] four times for a job\u201d without knowing \u201cwhat [she] would be selling if [she] ever got in.\u201d Poonam entered the lives of her subjects as she spent time with them. Khan asked her to suggest a name for the event company he was planning to start, while an employee at a call centre asked her to pay monthly instalment on his car loan. Snippets like these make Poonam\u2019s book a lively read, as interesting as the lives of the people whose stories it tells.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Title: Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World<\/em><\/p>\n Author: Snigdha Poonam<\/p>\n Publisher: Viking (Penguin Books India)<\/p>\n Pages: 256; Price: INR 599<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Review of Snigdha Poonam\u2019s book, \u2018Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":1454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_seo_keywords":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/78"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}