(Published in the Times of India, August 15 2026)

In 1967, the filmmaker SNS Sastry interviewed a bunch of 20-year-olds born around the time of India’s independence. It was a wide spectrum. One fashionable chap sang a Beatles song and longed for a career in the movies. Another, a daily wage earner, lived in a world so different that he couldn’t name the country’s prime minister. Some kids were optimists: “I am better off than my father in every respect.” Others were cynical: “What is my future in this country?” A particularly wise young man observed: “Our achievement [after two decades of independence] is that we have a hopeful tomorrow. Our failure is that our today is precarious.”

India has always thrown up such contradictions. Yet, if one were to interview today’s Gen Z, the responses would appear more dire. For decades we have trumpeted India’s “demographic dividend”. Those who constitute said dividend, however, confront a world in unprecedented flux. Nothing is predictable: not jobs, not technology, not even the weather. Of course, experts with facts and figures can (accurately) argue that the country has made great strides. Only that nations and people aren’t just statistical computations. It is small consolation to tell a student without internet access that her grandmother would have been grateful for a pencil.

In this age of anxiety, how do we go about building an India for our young, then? To start with, the establishment that dominates this country must act with grace. Age delivers experience and wisdom. But admittedly, it also tends to be jaded, set in its ways, sanctimonious, and reluctant to recognise fresher opinions. While those with experience and achievement can light the way, they must be careful not to act as a gerontocracy that inadvertently gets in the way of change. Millennials, together with the Gen Z, represent some 800 million people. If the future belongs to them, they deserve room to be active participants in drawing up tomorrow’s architecture.

But any design for the future must address a question: to what end? There is a way of painting success as a balance sheet: jobs, industry, GDP. This matters but cannot be the totality of our ambition as a society. An India in 2067 where children are still in a desperate, depressive rat-race for seats in 20 more IITs is not a country that is shining. Having swanky corporate offices where men and women slog overtime and acquire stress-related diseases is not progress. What one must aspire for is fuller lives, with room for pleasure, for joy, for curiosity, and for dreams. There is, after all, a great distance between merely existing and a dignified, happy existence.

If we are clear on these goals, much will have to be oriented accordingly. Will tomorrow’s India benefit from a larger, grander parliament with more seats? Not if bills affecting education and healthcare are passed summarily in minutes. A smaller house, where substance prevails, not form alone, will serve the national interest far better. So too, an India for the young cannot be one where some belong and others are excluded. It cannot be a country for men, while women struggle; it cannot be a nation caught up in endless contests over religion. To squander energies on accumulated baggage is to reduce our march into the future to a pitiful hobble.

Much of this is linked to ideals. Or as an interviewee in that 1967 film put it, “People live for all sorts of things…but essentially they live for something they have an emotional commitment with, something they belong to.” Too often this sentiment is reduced to jingoism; far too readily we in the present have allowed nativism free rein. The consequences are appearing across the globe, and they are ugly. If tomorrow’s Indians are to be spared this error, we must own our mistakes and offer a larger, more capacious vision of the world. It would be an irony if alongside the advent of artificial intelligence and ever more astonishing technology, we also have burning communities.

Importantly, empowering the future comes with its innate risks and tensions. New thought, for instance, might sit uneasily within the existing order. It can seem threatening even. Innovation too cannot always be incubated in approved spaces, conforming to sarkari rules and proprieties. Change is messy. Yet if we embrace and move with it, the process can be less grating. We hold the tools for this already. Our Constitution possesses a dynamism and agility that allows it to remain relevant across generations. Our establishment and citizenry have both let it down on occasion. Yet, if we truly act in accordance with its spirit, the future too will feel reassured about vesting faith in this farsighted national document. It can, in its own way, offer an anchor.

Ultimately, though, building an India for the young is about pursuing a worthy today, here and now. That wise fellow in the 1967 documentary saw in his present a certain fragility but looked to the future with hope. In our time, the challenge is more forbidding: the present is thorny, but so is, increasingly, the future. We cannot be sure what the years will bring. But it is entirely within our powers to square and correct the missteps of our own time. Fashioning an India for the next generation, then, becomes a simpler, more practical affair: make the correct choices, fight the right battles, and stand up for what matters—today.