New Youth of Kolkata

Photographs and text by Meaghan Major

This is the first step of a longitudinal project on the new youth of Kolkata. These young people are from the middle and high middle Indian social classes and are struggling everyday with the new ways of life in their rapidly transforming country. Indeed, India is becoming one of the most powerful countries of the 21st century and its lifestyle has tremendously changed with the economic development. Today the young generation, the future of India has a foot in each of two competing worlds: the old India, locked in its traditions, and the new India focused on richness, material possessions and development. These young people are well educated. For example, Tanmey (6th picture) has a nuclear engineer degree from Berkeley University in California. But they have decided to pursue their dreams, and wish to become actors. Today this group of friends is being judged by their family, rejected by their community for not pursuing a “successful” professional life. I want to show their lives, their difficulties of being themselves in their country, very significant of the complexity of the paradoxical, struggling, changing India.