'Timepass' is India's way of lying flat

By Andy Mukherjee

In the quirky world of Indian English, “timepass” is of relatively recent vintage. Its first known appearance was in a newspaper article from 1982. But like “prepone” — the opposite of postpone — the word has gained currency because of its sheer efficiency.

“What are you doing nowadays?” a friend inquires. “Timepass,” comes the reply. The stuff that’s filling up one’s day is really of no importance; it’s just helping pass the hours. The friend will know better than to probe any further.

In smaller Indian cities and towns, where opportunities for advancement are few and dwindling, the noun is emerging as something of a social and cultural phenomenon. It bears resemblance to China’s “lying flat” movement, which tells young people to opt out of the economic race and settle for mediocre workplace success and modest consumer fulfilment.

The 2010 book, Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India, locates the concept in sociology: A generation of young people has a vision of the future but no capacity at its disposal to realize the goal. So it advertises its fruitless waiting “through a self-conscious strategy of hanging out,” writes Craig Jeffrey, a professor of geography at the University of Melbourne.

The ennui of the unemployed youth that the author captured during his field work in Meerut — a once-thriving manufacturing hub near New Delhi — has gotten worse. The respectable, middle-class careers they’re waiting for have become elusive; the spread of artificial intelligence will make them rarer still. The unemployment rate among young college graduates in India was 29 per cent even in the post-pandemic economy, according to the International Labor Organization’s 2024 report, nine times higher than the 3 per cent-plus joblessness among those who cannot read or write. For female graduates, the number was as high as 34 per cent.

The smartphone has replaced the college canteen as the preferred venue for prolonged waiting. Of late, Indians are spending four hours a day on their mobile devices on average, up from 3.3 hours in 2023. A fifth of this time is devoted to watching short-form videos — not just Instagram Reels, Facebook Watch and YouTube Shorts, but also apps like Josh and Moj. The local platforms are preferred, especially outside big cities, for content that’s from closer to home and more relatable, according to RedSeer Strategy Consultants.

Also, virtual tips on local platforms cost 1 to 2 cents (cheaper than a cup of tea), which is why the market for online gratuity, a way for followers to “show love” to their favorite influencers, is on the cusp of a 10-fold surge to $700 million-plus by 2029, the consulting firm estimates. Throw in bigger revenue streams from marketing and advertising, and the so-called creator economy is basically the commercialization of timepass — with active encouragement of the state. In March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented the first-ever National Creator Awards.

The West is hardly the exemplar here. The real inspiration for the cultural shift is China, which now has 21,000 hotels dedicated to gamers who want to play League of Legends, undisturbed by parents and real-world friends. India will get there in time, with its homegrown fantasy-sports apps like Dream11. China’s lie-flat generation, which rejects hard work in favor of doing as little as possible to get by, “grew up with plenty of things,” as my colleague Shuli Ren recently explained in her essay. “Now they are not only grumbling online and in milk tea shops about bleak job prospects; they’re swapping consumerism for self-care and activities that enrich their spirits, like camping, traveling and concert-going.”

Since it neither had China’s one-child policy nor its sustained pace of double-digit economic growth, the cohort that came of age with an abundance of material possessions is still small in India. For a majority of youth, lying flat is not a durable solution… yet. From attempting the risky “donkey” route of border-crossing to enter the US illegally, to getting duped to join the Russian army in Ukraine, desperate job seekers are taking dangerous steps to escape hopelessness at home. Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a northern India region poorer than sub-Saharan Africa, recently bragged about the 5,600 youth that have gone from the state to work on construction projects in Israel.

Still, the technology for lying flat has arrived, as well as the possibilities and pitfalls associated with it. Recently, the police raided and caught 73 call-center employees (33 of them were women, according to the Times of India) near the national capital. Allegedly, these people used to leave voicemails on Americans’ phones pretending to be US marshals, and claiming stolen social security numbers to force them to pay. That’s the “export” surplus of organized digital criminality. In the home market, scams have simply exploded.

Even when the byproducts of digitization aren’t criminal but just morally dubious — such as a 10-year-old “spiritual orator” with more than a million social-media followers — they’re weakening rational beliefs. They’re also loosening community ties, and spawning disillusionment with traditional markers of success. The Mint journalist Devina Sengupta, who told me about Jeffrey’s book, recently wrote about boredom as the invisible cause of rising attrition at work in cities like Bengaluru and Mumbai.

Therapists are getting the usual complaints about eating and sleep disorders, depression, and anxiety. “No one comes in saying ‘I’m bored,’” a clinical psychologist told Sengupta, even though the real problem is “nothingness.”

Give it another 10 years. As families shrink, authorities might have to reckon with nihilistic youngsters who both want to retreat from society, and have enough parental wealth to do so. In affluence, attitudes, and absence of effort, India’s timepass generation may not be that different from its lying-flat Chinese counterpart.