I detest the word “youth”. First of all, it is one of those inconvenient words about which one is never sure what part of speech it is at any particular point in time. Noun, plural: the youth are revolting. Noun, singular: the youth is wearing a fake Versace T-shirt. Adjective: global youth culture, the youth vote. Nobody seems to agree, furthermore, on whether it’s “youth” that are revolting, or “the youth.” The moment you use it, it’s difficult to not sound pompous, like a government planning document or an Obama campaign manager. And, of course, it seems overused: everybody wants us to believe that what they’re peddling somehow connects with youth. Or the youth.

Except it isn’t really overused. The word is everywhere because the concept is. Almost 30 per cent of Indians are under 15; over half are under 25. India’s median age is the lowest among the major liberal democracies and major economies. Our electorate, our workforce, and our consumers are all correspondingly young. The word’s ubiquity notwithstanding, our policy-making has changed only marginally; our political culture — and even our pop culture — has responded to a changing age profile even less.

These elections have driven home exactly how much of a gap this can create between those who make plans and those who they’re planning for. The BJP, for example, is generally believed to have missed a trick when it decided that V.K. Malhotra would have to be its chief ministerial candidate in Delhi. The capital is believed to have seen a big jump in first-time voters, perhaps three million of them. (Of course, there would no doubt have been more if the election commission had not tried airing irritating “youth-friendly” jingles on FM encouraging people to vote.) And, according to a couple of exit polls, they went with the Congress rather than the BJP by a double-digit margin.

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