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Book Review: Young people in India
書評：印度青年
Dreams and nightmares
美夢與噩夢
A study of India's new generation finds its members as angry as they are ambitious
關于印度年輕一代的一項研究發現，印度青年的雄心有多壯闊，怒氣就有多盛
Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing the World.
《夢想者：印度青年如何改變世界》
By Snigdha Poonam.
施尼德哈·普那姆著
Vinay Singhal and his brother, Parveen, co-founded WittyFeed, a content factory that churns out clickbait, as a Facebook page in 2011.
2011年，維納伊·辛格哈爾和其兄弟帕維恩，共同成立了WittyFeed，這是一個在Facebook頁面快速大量生產吸睛內容的平臺。
By 2016 it had its own website, 150 writers around the world, a valuation of $30m and a big HQ in Indore, a third-tier city about halfway between Mumbai and Delhi.
到2016年，WittyFeed已經建立了自己的網站，簽約了全球150名寫手，估值3000萬美元，在孟買和德里之間的三線城市印多爾設有一個很大的總部。
Mr Singhal has bigger aspirations yet;
但辛格哈爾的野心遠非于此；
for a while he thought he might aim to become prime minister.
曾經他還想過，將來可能會把目標設為登上印度總理寶座。
And why stop there?
為什么止步于此？
"I want to lead humanity…I want to lead Mars," he tells Snigdha Poonam, an Indian journalist.
“我想引領人類，我想超越羅馬戰神馬耳斯，”他在印度記者施尼德哈·普那姆采訪時說道。
"Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing the World", Ms Poonam's first book, contains an abundance of bombastic characters.
普那姆第一本書《夢想者：印度青年如何改變世界》，描繪了很多懷有遠大志向的人物。
"Eyes red f rom sleepless nights of plotting his and his country's rise to glory, Singhal can seem like the face of the new India," Ms Poonam writes.
“辛格哈爾為籌謀自身和祖國的崛起，不眠不休，雙眼通紅，”普那姆在書中寫道。
"This new India", she adds wryly, "is not always easy to like."
“這個新印度”，她以冷酷的筆觸寫道，“不總是容易讓人愛上。”
Quite.
入木三分。
The country she describes is deeply worrying.
她筆下的印度堪憂。
Two-thirds of India's 1.3bn citizens are under 35.
印度13億人口中，三分之二年齡低于35歲。
Roughly 1m people enter the workforce every month.
每月約有100萬人口成長為勞動力人口。
Few find jobs; most graduates are too poorly educated to be employable.
但找到工作的極少；大部分畢業生受教育程度太低，無法就業。
Meanwhile a numerical gender imbalance means many men remain single.
與此同時，性別比例失衡意味著很多男性會保持單身。
Yet India's young men—Ms Poonam's interlocutors are mostly men, because they dominate public spaces—believe they can have it all.
但印度的年輕人（普那姆女士書中采訪的對象大部分為男性，因為男性在公共領域占主導地位）相信他們可以達成心之所向。
And they believe they are owed it all.
且他們認為達成所想是理所應當。
Unlike previous generations, they see the pleasures of the wider world in their Facebook feeds, Instagram timelines and WhatsApp chats,
不像之前的幾代人，這代年輕人通過Facebook信息流、Instagram時間軸以及WhatsApp通訊聊天感知到廣闊世界的快樂，
and wonder why everybody else goes on foreign holidays, drives imported cars, and parties with vodka and girls.
他們還想知道為什么別人都去國外度假、開進口車、參加有伏加特酒和姑娘的聚會。
They blame the Muslims, the West, the Congress government and its decades of socialism and appeasement of minorities.
這代印度年輕人批判穆斯林、指摘西方國家、駁斥印度國大黨政府及其數十年社會主義和對其他宗教少數派的綏靖政策。
Now Narendra Modi, whose muscular brand of Hindu nationalism has fired up the young, is prime minister.
現在的印度總理納倫德拉·莫迪強大的印度教民族主義鼓舞了印度青年。
He will put those miscreants in their place.
莫迪將讓那些不法之徒安守本分。
譯文由可可原創，僅供學習交流使用，未經許可請勿轉載。
