Hungry, not lazy.
Letter 154. Hungry, not lazy.
Dear friend,
This week, a word landed in court. Cockroach. The Chief Justice of India used it for young Indians without jobs. The word found a microphone. Then Twitter. Then a 30-year-old in Boston who built a website overnight, called it the Cockroach Janata Party, and within three days the movement had 12 million followers.
I am not writing today to be political. I am writing because the word landed somewhere in me, and I think it landed somewhere in a lot of you too.
I have spent twelve years with young people and parents. Almost daily. The two most common things I hear from the older generation about the younger are these. They are lazy. They are entitled. I have heard it in living rooms, in CEO offices, in PTA meetings, in HR roundtables. And every time I hear it, something inside me rebels. Because in twelve years, I have not yet met a lazy person. I have only met hungry ones, mistaken for something else.
Let me tell you about the fourth week.
I was twenty years old. Third year of mechanical engineering, on what was called a 'sandwich' program. One semester in college, one semester inside a real factory floor. Week one was electric. Robotic machines whizzing in air thick with the smell of lubricant. A 6:30 am bus to a part of Pune I had never seen. Men thrice my age running CNCs older than I was.
By week four, the sheen was gone.
The trainees were not allowed to operate anything. We were observers. There was a design department I wanted to walk into. There was a CNC room I wanted to put my hand on. We were not allowed past the yellow line on the floor. We sat. We watched. The bus picked me up at 6:30 am and dropped me back twelve hours later, and in between, we watched men work.
This is the most painful prison to be in. To be forced to watch and not allowed to do. No agency. No power. No freedom.
So I started changing where I was standing.
On the 50-minute bus to the factory, I closed my eyes and practised my guitar scales mentally. No guitar in my hand, no metronome, just the rosewood fretboard in my head. Every morning. Three months. On the factory floor, I stopped trying to be the engineer-in-waiting. I went and stood next to an operator. I picked up a broom. I cleaned scrap that fell off the steel blocks. I ate lunch with the operators. I dropped the engineer ego. I asked questions.
Slowly, the operators started handing me things.
A lever. Then a wheel. Then a whole part. By the end of training they sent me to Chennai for a month to install a robotic machine for a client. The kid forbidden from touching anything was now the kid the company picked to fly.
From outside, the fourth week looked like nothing. A boy on a bus. A boy with a broom.
From inside, the engine was burning.
A reader wrote to me last Sunday after Letter 153. I have never met her. I do not know how my letters reached her inbox. She wrote me one line I want to share with you, exactly the way she wrote it.
"The chaos I am feeling right now isn't a failed painting. It's just the heavy, messy underpainting. It is the slow, forty-five-minute stirring of the onions for the biryani when everything just looks like a burnt, unappetising mess before the flavors actually come together."
Read that twice.
Now imagine her mother walking into the kitchen at minute twenty-three of the caramelisation. The pan looks dark. The onions look wrong. The smell is not yet good. What does the mother say?
Most of us say: what are you doing, you are wasting time, the onions are burning, lift the pan off.
And we walk out feeling like we have helped.
My father told me one line when I was young, that I ignored for the next twenty years.
Only when you are acting on your full potential, you will be happy.
I dismissed it as another fatherly platitude. Then in my thirties, several seasons of unhappiness made me sit down and list what I already knew I could do.
I know I can be fit.
I know I can write a book.
I know I can launch a business.
I know I can learn a new language.
I know I can build a team.
I know I can do something that did not exist before.
I know I can. But am I? Am I living it to my fullest? Am I enjoying and savouring every moment of it?
That is the diagnosis. Every season of unhappiness in my life turned out to be the same thing wearing different costumes. The triggers looked like missing friends, missing recognition, missing money, missing love. The triggers were never the cause. The cause was always the same. Something I knew I could be doing, that I was not doing.
I do not think this is just my problem. I think this is the quiet shape of most of the unhappiness around us. And I think this is what the young people of this country are reacting to right now, when a Chief Justice picks the wrong word.
They are not unwilling.
They are unused.
So here is what I want to say to you this Sunday, especially if you are a parent.
The young person in your house this week. The one you think is on their phone too much. The one not getting up early. The one not getting the marks. The one whose interests look pointless to you. The one whose anger is louder than you would like.
Before you call them lazy. Before you call them entitled. Before you call them anything.
Walk into the kitchen at minute twenty-three.
Stand beside the pan. Do not lift it off the heat. Do not turn it down. Do not say what you would say.
Ask. What are you cooking. And then wait. Even if the answer is unclear. Even if it sounds half-baked. Even if it sounds nothing like the answer you wanted to hear.
If they are hungry, they will find the lever. They will find the wheel. They will find the part. They will find the flight to Chennai.
They do not need you to give it to them.
They need you to not call them cockroaches while they are finding it.
A whole generation is hungry right now. A country with a median age of 28 has told them they are the future, and then handed them a Parliament where the average MP is 56. Eleven percent of MPs are aged 40 or under. Over half are 55 plus. The youngest country on earth has the oldest leadership it has ever elected.
That gap is not an accident. It is what the rage is pulling on.
These young people are not asking for a free pass. They are asking for the line on the factory floor to move.
We can call them lazy. We can call them entitled. We can call them cockroaches.
Or we can ask better questions.
Cooking this week. Birista. Such an interesting word. Also called beresta in Persian kitchens. Thinly sliced onions, deep-fried in hot oil until they hit a crispy, golden brown. Such a versatile thing. The savoury crown that sits over a biryani. The base folded into kormas and dum curries across South Asia and the Middle East.
And the strange thing about birista is this. It is made only by cooking and cooking and cooking. You stand over the pan. The oil hisses. The onions go from pale to yellow to amber. They start to look dark. You think they are burnt.
They are not.
There is a window where they tip from looking ruined to looking like gold. The only way to find that window is to keep cooking. Not stirring less. Not lifting them out early. Just cooking. And then trusting your eye.
You think it is burnt. It is not. It is becoming gold.
I will see you next Sunday.
As ever,
Adi
P.S. To those who replied, thank you for writing back. Your letters caught me right where I was sitting. Mid-layer, biryani-onions, all of it. I have carried you with me all week.
P.P.S. Another reader wrote to me this week from a different India entirely. She runs a foundation for children in villages who do not get the luxury of being called lazy. They are pulled into earning long before anyone asks what they might want to build. If you have time, money, or hands to lend, write back and tell me. I will connect you.
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