By Akhil Paliath:
Everybody likes youth and young people. They are shiny, energetic and look great in promotional material. But the burden of having to solve every single problem facing the world sometimes becomes too much and we are left disappointed with our GenX.
Inspired by a similar post in the New Yorker, here is a selection of the 20 most disappointing people in their 20s, in the development sector in India.
Signed up to be a volunteer teacher but spent all his time uploading pictures of his students on Instagram with hashtags like #educationrocks and #mybundlesofjoy.
Sameera Krishnamurthy, 25
Works at a donor agency headquartered in Delhi. Spent two weeks pressurising her grantees to include an expensive evaluation in their project. She then refused to fund it because it was a ‘non-programme’ expense.
Aravind Karnani, 24
Visited a homeless shelter once just so he could add #humanitarian to his tinder profile.
Rohan Patkar, 25
Joined a nonprofit founded by his parents to professionalise the organisation and revolutionise everything. In his first month Rohan promoted himself to ‘Chief Innovation Ninja’, put up some posters, changed the layout of the cafeteria and then gave a TEDx talk about his achievements. It was not a great talk.
Anjali Patkar, 23
Rohan’s sister. She still works at the nonprofit and attends every team meeting. Nobody is sure what she does or which department she is a part of.
Kumar Pashupathy, 23
Kumar practices laughing in front of a mirror every morning so that he can laugh convincingly at the ‘jokes’ that his executive director makes.
Claire Stewart, 23
Raised fifty thousand dollars from her parents to found a nonprofit to fight against the negative portrayal of snakes in Hindi movies.
Radha Venkatraman, 23
Complained about surviving on a social sector salary as her driver drove her home to her Cuffe Parade penthouse.
Kriti Kruti, 25
Raised a hundred thousand dollars for a pilot program that only worked with four people. Two of them dropped out mid way. He still thinks the pilot was a success.
Azam Merchant, 29
Spend six months working at a multinational before moving to the social sector. He now introduces himself as a ‘private sector guy’.
Stephanie White, 20
Intern. Got the word ‘kranti’ tattooed on her forearm in devanagiri script as an act of rebellion against her parents. It was misspelled.
Shireen Jehangir, 26,
Wrote about attending the Coldplay concert under the ‘social service experience’ in her MBA applications.
Supriya Singh, 26
Spends all morning talking about how she has stayed back late to work every day this month. Still hasn’t turned in the one page report she was asked for two weeks ago.
Karan Nathani, 27
Outnumbered by women on his team. Mansplains about the dangers of mansplaining at every weekly meeting.
Piyush Ambani, 29
Started a family foundation so that his wife would have something to do with her time. The foundation focuses on women’s empowerment.
Shomit Sen, 28
Had a nervous breakdown at a site visit in Patna and checked-in to the closest Taj.
This was originally published on India Development Review. You can read it here.
About the author:
Akhil Paliath: Akhil works with Central Square Foundation(CSF), as a part of the team helping the Gujarat education department design and implement a long-term quality improvement plan to improve learning. Before joining CSF he worked as a consultant with Lumen Consulting, a social sector consulting firm, and with Dasra as a part of the team that managed multimillion dollar initiatives such as the Dasra Girl Alliance and the Dasra Adolescent Collaborative. Akhil has a Masters in International Affairs from the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna as well as bachelor degrees in financial markets and international relations from the University of Mumbai and London.