Published in 2018
256 pages
Snigdha Poonam is a national affairs writer with The Hindustan Times in Delhi. Her work has appeared in Scroll, The Caravan, The Times of India, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The Financial Times. Her article ‘Lady Singham’s Mission Against Love’ was runner-up in the Bodley Head / Financial Times Essay Prize, 2015. She won the 2017 Journalist of Change award of Bournemouth University for an investigation of student suicides that appeared on Huffington Post. Dreamers is her first book. It won 2018’s Crossword Book Award (Jury) for nonfiction and was longlisted for PEN America Literary Awards. Dreamers also featured in many best-books lists including The Financial Times’ and The Hindu’s.
What is this book about?
More than half of India is under the age of twenty-five and the country is set to have the youngest population in the world by 2021. But India’s millennials are nothing like their counterparts in the West.
In a world that’s marked by unprecedented connectivity and technological advancement, in a country that’s increasingly characterized by ambition, political power and access, in an economy that appears to be breaking down the barriers to wealth that existed for every previous era, this is a generation that cannot – will not – be defined on anything but their own terms. They are wealth-chasers, attention-seekers, power-trappers, fame-hunters. They are the dreamers.
Snigdha Poonam’s remarkable cultural study of the unlikeliest of fortune-hawkers travels through the small towns of northern India to investigate the phenomenon that is India’s Generation Y. From dubious entrepreneurs to political aspirants, from starstruck strivers to masterly swindlers, she travels – on carts and buses, in cars and trucks – through the India’s badlands to uncover a theatre of toxic masculinity, spirited ambition and a kind of hunger for change that is bound to drive the future of our country. These young Indians aren’t just changing their world – they’re changing yours.
