Selfie-taking millennials need to look in the mirror and reflect

Dear Millennial, it’s your fault.

What, you ask?
All of it. 

All of the things going wrong in India are a result of your very existence in this country. 

Our Finance Minister pointed out how “the automobile industry has been affected by BS6 and the mindsets of millennial, who now prefer to have Ola and Uber rather than committing to buying an automobile.” She’s right, you know, and she has only touched the tip of the ice-cube floating in that iced-Americano you sipped in for lunch.

Please sit back and keep scrolling down with your manicured thumbs while I explain why you, my dear fellow millennial, are the reason for India’s inevitable demise.

Demographic Drawback

For far too long have you been spoilt by everyone, from economists to politicians. “These Millennials are our demographic dividend,” they said. “They’re the future of India only,” they said. The truth is, you’re a Demographic Drawback. Get off your high-rainbow-unicorns, wake up and smell the chai.

Speaking of waking up, why don’t you wake up early? While your parents are up and about at six in the morning, you get up at 10 am, don yesterday clothes and are off to work. Just putting on half a bottle of deodorant and painting your faces to cover the hangover from last night’s torrid weekday drinking is ruining everything. This is exactly why you take cabs to work, don’t you? Instead of jostling around in the metros and locals, which would help you understand everyday hardships, you cocoon yourself in an air-conditioned cab, texting away to glory with your fellow millennials and cribbing about the state of the economy.

Wake up and smell the sweat in public transport, I say. Our glorious government is investing so heavily on infrastructure. For whom? For what? So that you can just ignore these amenities and fill the pockets of cab companies?

Rethink your life.

Speaking of rethinking your life, why aren’t you married yet? While your parents got married at the correct age, in their 20s, you’re still waiting for that ‘special someone’ who will slide down a rainbow, whisk you away to Paris and put a ring on your finger. Marriage is not Instagram fodder, OK? It’s a serious business.

Marriage is a way to spend an incredibly unreasonable amount of money in order to grow the GDP. By resisting this nation-building activity and delaying it, you are not letting society grow. You want cheap weddings, you ask for like a 100 people to attend the wedding rather than the usual 1500 hungry acquaintances your parents want to invite. What’s more, you don’t want to hire those photographers for the wedding because now you have 10 friends taking pictures for Instagram and posting them with a silly hashtag mashup of you and your partner’s name. You have killed the photography business too, you hear? 

What is this nonsense? Don’t you care about the economy? You are actively preventing India from entering the Golden age.

Speaking of Golden age, why don’t you buy gold anymore? All those airport Swarovski shops might stock attractive expensive crystal jewellery but it’s not gold, dammit. Next to nothing resale value! Go check your mom’s locker in that public sector bank which is filled with gold jewellery. She never wears it, except for that one time when your cousin got married, but the value of that stockpile just increases every day. Your jewellery box, on the other hand, is filled with fake crystals and tangled trinkets from Sarojini Nagar. 

Shameful.

Entitled Aimless Living

Look at yourself in the mirror. Oh wait, you don’t believe in mirrors anymore. Just open that high definition selfie camera on your phone and look at yourself once. What do you see?

Entitlement. That’s what you see.

You keep that beard on your face, not because the ladies love it. It’s because you’re lazy. Good citizens clean shave their faces and help the facial hair industry grow. 

What? What’s that you said? You go to a unisex parlour to shape your beard and all? Wow! Amazing. But now you’re just taking away the business from manly men roadside barbershops. Remember those days when your dad used to take you to that barber who would put on a Hindi movie channel, forcing his customers to watch a Mithun Chakraborty flick while rapidly removing hair like a crazed maniac? Yeah. You don’t realise that by not going to that barber anymore, you’re not only affecting his business but also reducing the TRP of Hindi movie channels. Your unisex parlour is just a scam that adds nothing to the economy except importing expensive FMCG products, applying them on your face and ignoring the greatness of Patanjali.

Now switch your selfie camera to HDR mode and look closer. Look deep into those eyes. What do you see?

Aimlessness. That’s what you see.

If you would’ve planned, as your parents did, you’d be thinking of saving money. You’d be thinking of raising children at the correct age. You’d be thinking about buying property, buying cars. You don’t do any of that, do you? You just don’t care about the economy, do you?

There was a time, not long ago, when your parents were working hard, sticking to the same job their entire working life, just to amass enough wealth to buy that 2BHK in Greater Noida. While you live in your rented apartment in Green Park, pretending like you own the place, here’s some news for you: You don’t own anything.

The truth is, you pay excessive rent to feed your lazy habit of getting up late so you can reach work within 20 minutes. Then you go online and crib about how you have nothing left in your bank account at the end of the month. Your hand-to-mouth existence involves splurging on Zomato Gold offers, flying to Amsterdam for your birthday and spending whatever is left to purchase that new Alexa speaker–a device which you can talk to so you don’t feel the lonely bottomless pit in your heart.

The real estate sector is in the pits because of you. In fact, they’ve dug so many pits but aren’t able to build on it because you aren’t spending money on buying property. Greater Noida is now a ghost town because of you, you who wants to live in South Delhi and not give a crap about Uttar Pradesh no more.

And what is this new nonsense about not birthing kids, huh? You were given the title of Demographic Dividend so that you form a family unit and divide yourself into multiple more screaming snivelling Demographic Dividends. Now you say bringing in kids into this polluted, expensive, overheated world is unreasonable? Irrational? You’re preventing GDP growth by not bringing more productive citizens into the world. Where will all the future IT cell professionals, intellectuals and ‘jali na teri’ meme-makers come from?

It’s sad that you haven’t thought about all of this, dear millennial. Our Finance Minister is showing us the way, she is telling us where we are all going wrong, but you refuse to listen. You refuse to read between the lines.

You refuse to contribute to nation-building.

So get up, do some yoga, agree to that match your mom has found on Sanskari matrimonial websites, get your facial hair removed, buy that swadeshi product, get married, feed a million guests, buy an oversized SUV, give birth to more productive citizens and then –after you’ve achieved all this– tell everyone on WhatsApp what an amazing citizen you are.