Teenage wasteland: The death of hope in Delhi’s classrooms

Meher Baba, the silent sage from Ahmednagar, once promised that love would outlast every apocalypse. Half a century later, in a rock opera that never quite materialised, The Who’s Pete Townshend borrowed the guru’s name and fused it with the looping organ of Terry Riley to birth an iconic song that still howls across stadiums and schoolyards: Baba O’Riley. Townshend said the track was about a future in which technology would finally deliver its oldest promise – that entertainment would replace religion. Instead, it has begun to deliver despair to India’s youth.

‘Out here in the fields/ I fight for my meals/ I get my back into my living’.

On November 26, Constitution Day, I stood before five hundred schoolchildren from some of Delhi’s most privileged academies at the India International Centre. My brief was simple: speak to them about the values of the Constitution. As usual, I focused on fraternity. Other speakers spoke brilliantly on liberty, equality, and also on the duties of citizens. The students listened politely, as they always do. Then came the questions.

A girl in the second row asked why she should plant trees and cycle to school when the government allows the city to choke every winter. A boy followed: why should citizens fulfil their fundamental duties when the State so brazenly abdicates its own? Another, unusually thoughtful, conceded the moral case for reservation yet asked why the government insists on a zero-sum war – why not create more IIT seats, more medical colleges, so that no caste is asked to pay for the sins of history with its own future?

Then the temperature changed. Someone mentioned Bihar. The room sensed what was coming, commenting on the elections of earlier that week. ‘Professor, you advise us to exercise our electoral rights to effect change. But we cannot vote them out. The system is captured.’ Everyone nodded, and many clapped. ‘There are increasingly cameras everywhere, Aadhaar and biometrics, facial recognition, we are under the slow tightening of the surveillance net – we are afraid to protest, afraid to resist, afraid to be imprisoned for speaking our minds, and we see no escape into economic prosperity, youth unemployment is growing and with AI coming, do we have any hope at all?’

I have taught in America, Britain, throughout the EU, the areas we call the West. For years, this expression of hopelessness by the youth has been a Western speciality: unaffordable cities, vanishing professions, a planet on fire, governments that privatise profit and socialise loss. Europe added its own flavour – endless regulation, tethered bottle caps, biometric borders, and the quiet suffocation of the spirit under the weight of compliance. In those classrooms, the young spoke as though the game were already over.

Teaching in Asia, however, was always different. India was different. India was the country to which bright young expatriates were returning from the West because the horizon still widened every year. There was economic growth; there was opportunity. No longer, it seems.

‘Don’t cry/ Don’t raise your eye/ It’s only teenage wasteland’.

These children inherit choking air and poisoned rivers. They will protest at Jantar Mantar, there will be news, there will be violence, there will be noise – and then, the status quo will endure. They inherit a polity that speaks of fraternity while sharpening every old fracture – Hindu against Muslim, ‘upper’ caste against ‘lower’, patriarchy against feminism. They inherit artificial intelligence that promises to make their degrees obsolete before they have sat for their examinations. And now they inherit elections that feel pre-decided.

I tried the old professorial reflex: organise, vote, hold power to account. They looked at me with something close to pity. ‘Sir’, one replied, ‘the ballot is no longer a weapon as it was in your day; now it is theatre’.

‘Sally, take my hand/ Travel south cross land/ Put out the fire/ And don’t look past my shoulder/ The exodus is here/ The happy ones are near/ Let’s get together/ Before we get much older’.

I left the hall shaken. For the first time in 25 years of teaching, the despair felt symmetrical. The West had exported its spiritual exhaustion eastward, and India – once the last reservoir of forward-looking energy – had begun to drink from the same toxic cup.

Yet Meher Baba, whose name opens that song, also taught that despair is only love in disguise, waiting for the moment when it is ready to declare itself. These children are angry because they still believe something better is possible. That anger is not the end of the story. I want to believe that it is the first honest note.

‘Teenage wasteland/ It’s only teenage wasteland/ Teenage wasteland/ Oh, yeah/ Teenage wasteland/ They’re all wasted!’

The writer, as Dr Jekyll is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes.