New Delhi, March 24 -- 'Aspirational Young India' is a ubiquitous phrase whose taken-for-granted meaning is the intense desire and striving for material and social betterment. It assumes a well-directed action orientation around focused goals and a kinetic energy that powers India forward.

Our study started with no such preconceived meanings. It performed an emic or insider's deep dive into the contours of aspiration for the world of mass or mainstream young India, a world described in our previous column in Mint ('Young India is fuelled by agency but is being failed by structure,' 24 March) as one of exhausting entropy where agency comes up against the paucity of structures. In this piece, we focus on how to understand and read their as...