As India enters its 80th year of Independence, Esquire India shadowed seven college-goers—an MBBS senior in New Delhi, a journalism student in Mumbai, a business student in Kolkata, a literature and digital media senior in Bengaluru, a fashion design student in Rajkot, a former aviation ground staff professional studying filmmaking in Chennai and a queer mental health entrepreneur pursuing psychology in Lucknow—and pieced together a snapshot of a day in their life.
1.
“I feel weird running in the streets over here” - Isha Adhiya, 22, Bachelor of Design, NIFD, Rajkot
Rajkot can be both generous and limiting in the same breath. There’s a calmness here that feels almost bizarre if you’ve been stuck in traffic in Mumbai, argued over auto fares in Pune or breathed Delhi’s air. But there’s also a suspicion—of anything that doesn’t translate easily into profit. This is, after all, a city run by industrialists and businessmen, where ambition still speaks mostly through factories, diamonds and family firms.
Fashion design, by comparison, can still be mistaken, without much malice, for something closer to a hobby than a career.
Isha Adhiya has grown up inside that world. She loves that Rajkot lets her move at her own pace, that “afternoon naps are a birthright here”, not an indulgence, that she can walk into the same café three times a week and be greeted by name rather than an order number. Familiarity is comforting until it begins to prescribe your future. A city that knows everyone by name can also become a city that struggles to imagine them becoming something it hasn’t seen before. By 8am, she’s already on a tennis court before heading home, eating breakfast and opening her laptop. Evenings are spent fabric shopping at Jagnath on Yagnik Road. Some mornings it’s coursework. Most mornings lately, it’s Kalaratri’s Instagram, a Navratri collective of 20-somethings trying to make the festival sustainable and spiritual again.
“Along with college, I am also handling their social media,” she says, understating just how much of it she’s built. A merch line. Hampers. A fabric installation.
Ten years on, she doesn’t picture one city or one designation. She pictures designing with handloom and textiles. Creating content. Working on social media campaigns. The dream is the freedom to keep making things without someone deciding that adulthood begins the day curiosity ends. Her own privilege, she admits, allowed her the luxury to pay scant attention early on to the recent student protests—until social media made it impossible not to. What shook her was how quickly the conversation stopped being about students altogether.
She doesn’t see fashion as separate from any of it. “Fashion has been affected by all the wars, and all the reforms have led to women empowerment,” she says. Freedom, for her then, isn’t a word printed in a civics textbook. It’s about wearing what she wants without wondering who is looking. It is in feeling safe if she decides to stay out late. Not lowering her voice every time faith enters a conversation because someone, somewhere, has decided that difference is something to whisper about. “People assume that if someone is from some other religion, you should be very hush-hush about it,” she says. Her own friends have never made her feel that way. She knows enough to realise that isn’t true for everyone.
If there’s one thing she’d change about India over the next decade, it isn’t policy. “Maybe people become nicer to one another,” she says. It sounds almost impossibly simple, until you realise how much everyday life would have to change for that to be true.
Perhaps India could learn from Singapore, she offers. Not because of economics. It’s because of the evenings. People jogging. Cycling. Parks that stay alive after work because the country has incentivised movement. “If I want to go running, I’d feel really weird running in the streets over here,” she says.
Isha might be talking about fitness, but it is, inside, a simpler wish for cities where ordinary freedoms are ordinary. There’s freedom to run after sunset, wear what you want without calculating the consequences, choose a career your city doesn’t yet understand.
They sound like separate desires. To Isha, they are all versions of the same one.
—Takshi Mehta
2.
“AI can dig into logic but can it understand emotions fully? A patient is not a data set” -Ayush Singh, 22, Master’s in Counselling Psychology, Amity University, Lucknow
It’s a colonial term. As long as we keep thinking of queerness in a colonial language, it will always feel like a western import to the non-queer,” Ayush Singh says of ‘LGBTQ’.
The 22-year-old queer mental health advocate and trainee psychologist is all Lucknow, wearing a green chikankari kurta and black pants, just back from his college classes. He’s lived here most of his life, with its provenance of flavour, from galawati kebabs to Kashmiri chai. “As a teenager, I wanted to run away. Then I did, and came to realise what a safe space Lucknow is—it embraces you.”
Ayush insists that queerness is as old as India itself, from bits in Vedic texts to queer Sufi tombs, always existing in our country. “Who taught us that being queer was funny or could be a reason to bully? Not our past,” he adds. For someone used to reaching into the past—for his practice—Ayush’s current choice of binge-watch is the reality show Lock Upp.
He once chose to study psychology to be in the same class as a friend. Then the friend dropped out and Ayush was stuck with a subject he eventually came to love. It was a demonstration of how the universe had been working all along.
His mental health initiative, Chitt Organisation was founded to advance inclusive mental health tools that look to integrate Indian psychology in the present therapeutic practice. “There’s a gap I see,” he observes. “People prioritise the concepts of psychology that originate from the West. But this model fails here as India is a collectivist society and collectivist societies have belief systems that fall outside the limited scope of Western ideology. A therapist is a facilitator for a person, and to be an efficient facilitator, you have to understand a person’s belief system and work around it.”
Which is why he rules out the efficacy of AI in therapy. “It can dig into logic but can it understand emotions fully? A patient is not a data set,” he tells me.
The recent Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 that was passed removes self-identification for trans people, making medical board certification necessary for legal recognition. “Is that not violence,” he questions, when a trans person is asked to strip in order to ascertain identity.
He is confounded by the passing of the bill without an assessment of its mental health impact.
“A psychologist, a humanitarian activist, was anyone involved in this decision?” he asks, adding in the same breath, “Why are trans people not deserving of the same respect as everyone else?”
—Varisha Tariq
3.
“I might just be a cog in a machine, and it won’t be fun” - Adam Nathan Pereira, 20, Bachelor of Mass Media, Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai
Seven in the morning, at Vashi Railway Bridge connecting Navi Mumbai and Mumbai. There’s a beautiful stretch of water along the Harbour line where the local train speeds over the Thane Creek.
“Most days I just sit and enjoy the view, daydreaming as I go," says Adam Nathan Pereira. “Sometimes The Neighbourhood’s playing on my earphones. I’ve been listening to sombr’s “Ivy”, too, a lot these days.”
Adam’s like any other guy in college. Which also means a lot of his scrolling—he has a six-hour daily screen time—is devoted to Reels, which update him on the news. “Mostly independent journalists and smaller pages. I avoid mainstream news channels,” he tells me.
Keeping up with everything is necessary in Adam’s line of work. “It’s not a very fulfilling course—I was expecting more… technical knowledge. To learn things I didn’t already know. But here we have separate courses on English and Hindi. Like, it feels crazy to me, coming from ICSE and ISC schools, to travel four hours a day just to learn this.”
In the first year of college, Adam did an internship in marketing. It was followed by a course in digital marketing. “Which taught me the same things I had already implemented during the internship,” he says. Adam ended up learning nothing new. Though he does enjoy the media law and ethics course this year.
“I leave home at 6.30am every morning to attend the 8am lecture,” Adam tells me. He’s back home by two, after which it is time for a nap. He wraps up studies and assignments and then heads to the gym. At this point, the simplicity of his routine is what puts him in a better mental space. “I like this lifestyle: discipline, going to bed by midnight and getting up by five in the morning.”
There have been modelling gigs of late. “In an ideal world, I would really like to be a very successful model. But in the real world, I do think I’ll take marketing or do an MBA and see where it leads me next.”
Talk about life 10 years from now and all Adam sees are… not positives. “I imagine I’d be working like a dog, and I wouldn't be getting enough money to even buy a house. I’ll just be a cog in a machine, and it won’t be fun.”
Adam blames the “terrible” job market. “Income is at its absolute worst; companies are laying off people because of AI.” Ten years down the line, he’s sure it will get much worse.
Moving abroad, a dream for so many, is an option. “But the increasing racism against Indians scares me, too. There might not be a future for us where we shine. We are sc***ed if we go out, and sc***ed if we don’t.”
—Aditi Tarafdar
4.
“Is it so unrealistic to believe in a world united by one goal?” - Syed Shahid, 20, BA English Literature, Journalism and Digital Media, Christ University, Bengaluru
When he was younger, Syed Shahid and his dad used to watch Star Trek a lot. “The main premise is that the nations of the world are united under one federation, and they’re going out navigating, charting the galaxy,” he says, adding enthusiastically, “It’s such a cool idea to me—humanity bound together, exploring the galaxy. Is it so unrealistic to believe in a world united by one goal?”
These days, he is nursing a regret. A sudden shower stalled his scooter because of which he was unable to attend protests at Bengaluru’s Freedom Park, an impact radiating out of the movement at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.
He muses: “Like, we go to the UN saying, ‘Hey, we are the world’s largest democracy’. We shun a lot of other nations for good reasons. But then, it sounds hypocritical when your police are out there forcing people not to gather in a peaceful protest.”
Shahid was born and raised in Bengaluru in a multi-faith household—his mother, a Montessori teacher, is Hindu and his father, an HR professional, is Muslim. His life today revolves around college—he sets out from home at 8am on his scooter, winds through traffic on the infamous Bannerghatta Road and reaches college around 9am. Classes start at 9.40am and he’s often in college till 5.30pm because of his active involvement in Model United Nations (MUN) debates and conferences.
“We are planning an event in September and we meet every day to discuss that. A lot of time goes into getting the right permissions to host this kind of event. Pretty often, I’m also asked to judge MUN debates within the college and outside, so I jump around quite a bit,” says Shahid, grinning. Around him, the crowd of students going towards the college gate is swelling—the boys dressed in formal trousers and button-down shirts, the girls in colourful kurtas and jeans. Christ University has a strict dress code.
Shahid misses the time he was interning during his summer break at the independent news organisation The News Minute. As a media and journalism student, it was heady to step out and report on the ground—he wrote over 20 stories, many of them from the courts on ongoing cases. A one-time legal aspirant, Shahid would like to become a political and legal reporter after he
graduates. That is, if he doesn’t move towards his other area of interest, a postgraduate degree in international relations.
—Shrabonti Bagchi
5.
“How will an actor, a self-centred person, worry about you?” - Manoj Kumar, 25, Bachelor of Visual Arts, MGR Film and Television Institute, Chennai
I always had anger towards guns. A sickle or knife has other purposes, but the gun was intended to kill,” says Manoj. We are talking, somehow, about Stanley Kubrick. Three years ago, Manoj Kumar couldn’t have imagined he could leave his job as ground staff in the Chennai airport to study filmmaking; he had never even watched a Kubrick film yet. But here we are now, talking about Paths of Glory (1957), a World War II film by a Jewish director that isn’t about the Nazis but about the French Army, how the institution treats a person as a weapon and how, as a famous line goes, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
Under the shade of a banyan tree, in the modest yet verdant campus of the MGR Film and Television Institute, a day after the ‘Chalo Sansad’ march at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, Manoj tells me that he doesn’t believe in heroes. In Tamil Nadu—where for the third time, a movie star leveraged stardom into a seat in the Chief Minister’s chair—this is, to say the least, something of a minority view. “People say they need a change, but do you want an actor to be the change? I’m really worried,” says Manoj. “How will a king, an actor, a self-centered person, worry about you? Only a movement can change things,” he adds, citing the Dravidian movement and the Self-Respect movement led by Periyar.
A superstitious and studious child, Manoj grew up in the small city of Tirunelveli, believing that earning good grades and a good salary were all you could—and should—expect from this life. He didn’t play sports or talk to girls (he used to think women should defer to men). He didn’t watch films either. Then Mari Selvaraj’s Pariyerum Perumal (2018)—a film about how the spectre of caste violence destroys people—startled him into early adulthood. There are no heroes, he decided, but there most definitely are villains, and Manoj saw anew how Tirunelveli, where Pariyerum is set, had been hiding the same stories around him in real life.
While studying aviation in Chennai, he saw the possibilities of the big city, in which you might allow yourself a surreptitious helping of a forbidden dish, you might sojourn on the beach when you’re depressed, you might experience egalitarianism as freedom. You might catch a Rajini
film and love the way a dark-skinned hero represents your people in Kaala (2018), be skeptical about extrapolating a real-life political hero from that. You may then go on to identify with the hero in a film like Karnan (2021) after the regional manager at your airport job complains about you for not standing up when he enters the room. Finally, you might dream about writing stories for a living and writing the story of your life in turn.
And so, Manoj went back to school to do just that.
In film school and in Chennai, he found radical individualism. But he knows how to keep a healthy distance from what others romanticise too easily: the more space you have for yourself, he says, the more you’d want to fill it with things that supposedly represent your individuality, the more you buy useless crap and succumb to globalisation’s consumerist trap.
Now, in the city, his future isn’t secure, but he does have a present in this campus: he watched 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) on the big screen for the first time; Vetrimaaran is currently shooting a film at the campus and Manoj gets to walk amid Ambedkar and Periyar statues made for that set; he discusses cinema, politics and literature with peers and professors; he ends the day rewatching Kadaisi Vivasayi (2021), reminded of his boyhood in the village of Sholavandan, where his great-grandfather raised him for a time.
We tend to think of privilege as a cross to bear, but privilege is a nebulous thing.
Before we talked, he flagged that he isn’t fluent in English. His community background is not what the big city would consider to be privileged. But he knew he wanted to be a filmmaker when he watched Taxi Driver (1976). “This film is from the ’70s, in the US—I was watching from Tamil Nadu after 50 years with nothing in common with that culture, but it shook me.” This is how he came to believe in the centrality of stories in our lives and left his old life for the privilege of starting over.
Meanwhile, in the world of film, everything is increasingly commercial. How will the Periyar-loving, globalisation-hating, optimistic-cynic 25-year-old make it as a filmmaker? The plan is that he won’t even attempt a film until he’s 30. He wants to experience more of life, spend more time observing from the sidelines. He dreams of working with the Tamil director Ram. Besides, there is always an audience for a good story, he says. Just look at the shape the recent protests, a satirical force, took: the jester takes on the juggernaut. It is an artistic movement as much as it is a political one, he thinks.
If things go according to plan, Manoj’s signature as a filmmaker will be to disavow the most fundamental tenet of Indian movies. “I cannot make a film that says a hero will save the people,” he says. “Only a collective movement can save people.”
—Rohitha Naraharisetty
6.
“Women generally aren’t conditioned to take risks, like men do” - Anumeha Bhukya, 22, MBBS, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi
Briefs and fraying towels on clotheslines above us. A soggy noon and the damp heat of July. Somewhere, after weeks of building up, the rain’s ready to arrive. Anumeha Bhukya, who likes eggs and matcha, hasn’t had any breakfast, which is pretty much every day. She slowly leads me to the campus Chaayos.
“The outlet’s come up in the last two weeks, when I was away,” says Anumeha, back from a surgery posting in the morning. Almost all the cool eating spots here—the Dohful close to Chaayos, a couple of older cafeterias, the Kerala mess—are closer to the men’s hostel. “It’s quite a walk from the women’s hostel,” she tells me fretfully, the fact also alluding to the short delay in her showing up.
The layout of the hostel blocks renders the women’s hostel more exposed to the shady part of the premises. “Women have been catcalled there, though the last time around, we suspected the person was not of sound mind,” says Anumeha, taking a bite of her chicken tikka sandwich fast going limp.
She is an effortless conversationalist. Cadavers have intrigued her in her first year and the size of the universe breaks her comprehension. She is analytical and never finds an easy answer to give.
She’s annoyed by patients calling her “sister” and her male batchmates “doctor sahab” if they’re wearing the same lab coat, an annoyance she doesn’t let on too easily. “It’s not that I’m offended because they’re calling me sister, but why is the assumption never applied to the men?”
In fact, it’s this tiered ‘prestige’ hierarchy in the industry that she’s done with. She is vocal: “The way dentistry and nursing become second- or even third choice after MBBS—when both categories of healthcare workers are equally pivotal.”
Having witnessed angry patients and their families assault hospital staff, she says, “I feel really uncomfortable when someone tells me the doctor is like God.”
The Telangana-born 22-year-old is one of the 48 female students (against 84 male students) of her batch, which is the first in years to not have a glaringly skewed men to women ratio.
In 2019, it was eight women to 92 men.
“Women are generally not conditioned to take risks. The risk-taking mentality isn’t encouraged too much,” says Anumeha, who recalls her own dad’s rather nonchalant reception of the news that his daughter had made it to AIIMS four years ago.
“With the NEET, you have to be able to give yourself the space to guess,” she says.
The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test is a tragic vortex of our times. Between 2021 and 2026, 93 students were reported to have ended their lives because of NEET-related paper leaks, according to India Today. A vast majority of these suicides, Anumeha says, are those of women.
Even as concerned experts debate if decentralisation is a reform the exam needs, she disagrees. “The examination could be instead made computer-based and another attempt be added to the cycle,” she explains.
Medicine leaves women no option but to be anything less than superlative. What often happens is that even the thin “space to guess”—which unforgiving examination formats like this give students—doesn’t exist for women. Often, for underrepresented exam takers, the pressure to make it in the first attempt or forget about it, combined with the offline mode where you cannot reverse an answer, is a dream-ending scenario.
A tight buddy group, ordering biryani from Andhra Spices, dance competitions, watching the latest Christopher Nolan film, swimming, Community on Netflix, negotiating impostor syndrome, breaking bad news to the bereaved of patients’—on campus, you deal with all colours. You walk into the whole world. So much compressed alongside an MBBS in a short span of time has surely taught her to look through the first answer.
Such as the answer to the anti-reservation call that those opposing the recent student protests seem to have taken up.
“I had an ST reservation but I really wanted to clear it through General,” Anumeha tells me. She comes from a well-to-do family in Warangal, Telangana—her father’s a Railway Officer and mother works with Vijaya Dairy—and her parents struggled a lot as members of a marginalised community. “My dad would have to do others’ assignments to feel included. There was so much discrimination,” she says.
“Our population is so high. That’s something that makes competition for anything extreme. Not getting a seat where you wanted makes you resentful. If there were more seats, the share of unreserved seats would increase, too.”
It’s easy as a young person right now to envision a future elsewhere. Ten years from now, Anumeha wants to be living close to the beach: “I don’t know if it’s going to be here or abroad. But a water body for sure. Driving an all-terrain car and hopefully having found a reliable partner. The curve of becoming a doctor is really slow. I will have to depend on my parents or my partner for a while.”
—Prannay Pathak
7.
“The young don’t go away because of jobs” - Samyak Dutta, 20, Bachelor of Management Studies, St Xavier’s College, Kolkata
Why do people think bengalis aren’t business -minded?” Samyak Datta asks. The 20-year-old has travelled nearly an hour by Metro from New Town to Park Street, a journey that has become part of his everyday geography.
“It’s such a cliché. I’m from a Bengali Bene family—what people call Bania in Hindi. We’ve always had a business culture. People remember Bengal for its literature and art, but business has always been part of our history, too,” he says.
The city is settling back into its familiar rhythm after the summer break. Colleges have reopened, but many of his closest school friends have already left Kolkata for universities elsewhere.
A first-year Management Studies student at St Xavier’s College, Datta chose the course because it felt closest to the future he imagines for himself. He enjoys organising events and often ends up emceeing college programmes.
“Put me on a stage with a microphone and I'll make everybody laugh,” he says with a grin.
He spent his childhood in his grandparents’ ancestral home in Baranagar before moving to New Town. Most of his friendships came through school and, more recently, college. Like many students his age, he expects he, too, may eventually leave Kolkata. But he questions the popular explanation that young people move away simply because the city lacks opportunities.
“People usually say they leave because there aren’t enough jobs,” he says. “I think the bigger reason is independence. There’s something exciting about stepping outside your comfort zone and building a life on your own.”
Infrastructure matters, he believes, but only up to a point. Kolkata has institutions like St Xavier's, Presidency University and Jadavpur University, but only a handful of students get in. Many of India’s leading private universities are elsewhere, making migration almost inevitable.
By age 30, Datta hopes to have built a business of his own. The industry matters less than the act of creating something that works. Bengaluru, Pune and Mumbai appeal to him not because he wants to leave Kolkata behind, but because they offer the startup ecosystem he believes the city still lacks.
“Startups need people who are willing to take risks. Young people usually have a bigger appetite for risk.”
With few financial responsibilities, he already invests in small-cap mutual funds, believing youth is the time to experiment. Risk, he insists, is not alien to Bengalis; his own family’s business background is proof that entrepreneurship has long been part of Bengal’s history.
His ideas about success depart from convention too. Owning a house is not a milestone he feels compelled to chase. Given the choice, he would rather spend that money travelling than lock it into property.
Artificial intelligence does not worry him either. “It’s already here,” he says with a shrug. “If it helps people build better businesses or solve problems faster, we should learn how to use it.” He recently used AI to understand how to approach a college literature review before editing the work himself. To him, it is simply another tool.
The confidence to think independently, he says, comes from home. His family has never pressured him into a particular career, and his uncle, a professor at IIT Jodhpur, offers advice without ever dictating choices. “That’s the beauty of Bengali families,” says he. “We argue, we discuss, we have opinions—but there’s also a lot of freedom to choose your own life.”
Datta hopes Kolkata evolves into a city where more young people can build ambitious businesses, even as he suspects his own ambitions may eventually take him elsewhere. Yet there is still much he loves: political arguments spilling out of roadside tea stalls, the city’s mix of communities, and the possibility of beginning a morning with a Chinese breakfast at Tiretti Bazaar.
—Anuradha Sengupta
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