I have sat across from a lot of young people in the last few years.
In villages. In universities. In conference rooms that were trying very hard to feel informal. In circles on the floor in Janwaar, where the rule was simple: whoever speaks, speaks for themselves.
What I notice, more and more, is the same thing in very different faces.
A kind of static. Not anger exactly — though anger is often there too. Something underneath the anger. A loss of orientation so complete that the most basic question — what do I actually want? — has become genuinely unanswerable. Not because they are incapable of answering it. Because nobody ever taught them it was a question worth asking. Because the noise around them is so loud, and the scripts/expectations, yes somehow the social environment, so insistent, that the quiet place where that answer lives has never had a chance to develop.
I feel that they are not broken. No. It is much more that they have no orientation and that they are somehow lost. Lost in the specific way you get lost when the map you were handed turns out to describe a situation/surrounding/community/country that no longer exists.
The scripts didn’t hold. The expectations aren’t met.
Study hard. Work hard. Find your place in the system. The system will reward you. That was the promise — spoken or unspoken, it was the architecture of an entire childhood. And then they arrived at the edge of it and found: no jobs, or jobs that ask nothing of them. No family that holds them. No community that claims them. No story large enough to belong to.
And into that vacuum — something always moves.
Sometimes it is an ideology. Sometimes a charismatic man on a screen telling them that their emptiness has an enemy, and the enemy has a face, and the face is a woman or an immigrant or a government or a vague, distant them. It is not true. But it is a story. And a false story, in the absence of a true one, fills the space.
That is not stupidity. That is hunger.
I think about a boy I met in India. Fifteen or sixteen years old. Sharp, funny, quietly watching everything — the kind of kid teachers mistake for disengaged because he is actually more present than anyone else in the room, just not in the direction they are looking.
He told me, at the end of a conersation about change and agency and what it means to trust your own compass: nobody ever asked me that before.
Asked him what?
What I actually think. What I want. What I’m for.
He had been told, repeatedly and in many ways, what he was supposed to want. What the right answers were. What the script required. Nobody had asked him to locate himself inside his own life.
That is not unusual. That is, in fact, almost universal.
And it is, I think, the root of much of what we call radicalisation/frustration — which is just a “clinical” word for what happens when a young person’s hunger for meaning gets captured by something that promises to feed it.
What I do is not complicated. I want to be clear about that — because the temptation, when you see a problem this large, is to reach for a solution equally large. A programme. A framework. An intervention.
That is exactly the wrong move.
What I do is sit down. I ask questions and then I actually wait for the answer. I do not fill the silence. I do not offer the next question before the first one has been fully inhabited.
I ask: what do you care about? Not what are you good at. Not what do your parents want. What do you care about — when nobody is watching, when there is no grade attached, when the answer doesn’t have to be useful to anyone, when you are not afraid to break any kind of rules?
And then I listen. Carefully. For what is actually there underneath what they think they are supposed to say.
It takes time. Sometimes one conversation is not enough. Often it isn’t. But something happens in that space — something small and not dramatic — that I have watched happen in a village in rural India and in a seminar room in Berlin and in conversations with friends.
The person finds their compass.
Not a map. A compass. Direction, not destination. A sense of this way — which is enough to take a step. And a step is enough to begin.
The nine principles I drew from Janwaar apply here as directly as they apply anywhere.
Compasses over maps. You cannot hand a young person a plan for their life. You can help them locate their own direction.
Pull over push. The moment you deliver a solution to someone’s life, you have taken away the most important thing — their belief that the answer was in them. It was. It always is.
WE over ME — but here is what people always get wrong about that. You cannot build a genuine WE with a weak ME. A young person who does not know who he/she is, what he/she stands for, what he/she cares about — that young person cannot contribute to a community. He/she can only attach to one. And attachment without agency is how movements become mobs.
The work, then, is the ME. Strengthening it. Not the ego — the ego is already loud enough, often too loud, often the noise that drowns out the self underneath it. The genuine ME. The one that knows its own rhythm. The one that can pass the ball without needing to take the shot.
From that ME — a WE becomes possible. A real one. One that holds.
I do not know how to solve radicalisation. Or how to provide orientation. I want to be honest about that.
But I know what I have seen work — in a village of 1,200 people in Madhya Pradesh, in schools and universities and rooms that were trying very hard to feel informal — and it is always the same thing.
Someone sits down. Someone asks a real question. Someone waits for the answer.
And a young person — who has been performing the expected answer their whole life — hears themselves speak, perhaps for the first time, from somewhere true.
That is small. I know it is small.
But it is where everything begins. And it is, I think, the only place it ever actually begins.
The noise out there is very loud right now. The work is to be quieter than the noise. And to stay in the room long enough for something real to emerge.