Timepass: Youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in India

Abstract

Unemployment among educated young men has become a central feature of globalization. In this article, I examine the experiences and strategies of unemployed young men in the north Indian city of Meerut. Many of these men complain that they are "just passing time" (doing "timepass" ) in run-down government universities. But they also use this idea of themselves in limbo to fashion novel cultures of masculinity that partially bridge caste divides. I use a discussion of these young men's predicament to argue for an ethnographically sensitive political-economy approach to the study of youth, culture, and neoliberal transformation, one attuned to both the durability of social inequalities and cou..