Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything

I will start with the same sentence author starts with this book, because it practically capsulates the exact reaction I feel readers will have, it also captures the tone and level of articutlation the author has set:

“Dear reader, it is fine. I know the costs. Protect yourself. Read the words-if they make sense to you, cherish them, repeat them and celebrate them. If they don’t, remember they were balsphemous to begin with, written by dead man on dead pages. Just don’t put yourself in the line of fire. There is nothing I want less than for any reader of mine to find herself cut down to pieces while trying to defend it. Let it be. Let them be.”

The book starts with the definition of reader. Something which should hit many indians. “Reader” in this country are extremely rare even though our great nation has already crossed the literacy rate of 98% in many areas. Because our education system is flawed, or at least that’s what I used to think before I started reading this book. Now it feels like it’s not only flawed, but also very selective about what kind of thinking it encourages. Being a reader isn’t just about the being able to read, but also about which books you read. The form of books you are supposed to read is different from different people. Caste plays an important role here. With upper caste who seem to have access to “better” books and book circles compared to lower class. Knowledge creators/thinkers protect their walls from mere knowledge scavengers.

As a young adult, and older side of “Gen Z” I must say (and the book agrees with me), we as a generation has no idea about caste based oppression and the mayham indians have done in based on caste. We speak about caste like it is background noise, or something frozen in time, when in reality it continues to function quietly within our institutions, our choices, our homes and even our humour. We like to think of ourselves as modern and progressive, yet the book keeps forcing the uncomfortable realisation that modernity in india has never meant the absence of caste, only better camouflage.

So I want to emphasize the fact here, that I don’t konw what I’m trying to write here. Something intense has hit me and I don’t have enough knowledge to process these feelings. This is not a review but a seemingly tangible commentry on caste system, something this book has appropriately made me think about. To be fair, I’m writing and thinking about extremely sensitive topic here (or at least that’s what I feel when writiing this) which makes me both vulnerable, tad bit too struck by the facts and slighly less strong about my opinions. And that uncertainty feels oddly important, because this book doesn’t give you the comfort of solid ground. It puts you in a space where you keep questioning not just society, but yourself as well. I hope this piece doesn’t sound like attack on specific caste or religion. Although I’m using the authors own language (and unknowingly mimicking his writing style) I strongly believe this is extreme case of generalisation and people reader should read it as a generalised commentary and not take it personally.

I want to emphasize that I consider myself to be non-religious, immature and mostly liberal and have no intention to hurt anyones sentiments. But if you aren’t interested in this topic (because even I know most people won’t consider it relevant or sexy in modern era) then I would advise you to please stop reading. There’s nothing here for you and no point in reading something you wouldn’t like.

There are few pointers I want to lay out, not in any specific orders, something this book really goes deeper into (and author seems to have much stronger opinions about):

The glass floor

A metaphorical take on the devision between the savarnas (upper caste and class of in India) and the rest of the country. It genuinely boggles my mind to know that there’s no proper caste census ever happened to know exactly how many lower caste live in this country. But if the author is to believe then there are about 75% of population. Not to forget the total population of india is more than 1.4 billion. Which is equivalent to having entire europe and north amercia as non-savarnas and still treating them like a minority in power structures.

The metaphore is used throughout this book to explain how upper castes are both aware and unaware about the oppresions and neglect they perform on others knwoingly and unknonwingly. They move through life benefiting from these structures while simultaneously pretending they don’t exist. And that contradiction is what makes the glass floor so powerful. You can see through it if you try hard enough, but acknowledging it would mean accepting that your position was never purely earned.

There are very few non-savarna people in premiure institutes, in corporate world, in public sectors, in other oraganisations in india. Which seems statistcally unfair given their large number. This was bound to be mitigated by something called as arakshan. My understanding was only this much earlier. But only now I found out about the opression people actually go through and how much of their under-representation isn’t about lack of leaders but about the lack of recognition, access and voice.

For example, IITs, the most premier technical institutes in India have less than 20% (often less than 10%) professors from such communities. If I have to keep my woke hat on, I would consider it to be a fair representation as people from upper class have higher chances of getting good education and then later have higher chance of getting professorship. But the deeper issue is not just economics. It is about who gets to decide what is merit, who gets to sit on selection panels, who gets to define excellence. The gatekeepers of these spaces don’t just control entry, they control recognition as well. And this happens even in institutions that otherwise present themselves as “liberal” or “progressive”. Universities like JNU and AMU, often seen as ideological spaces of openness, have also witnessed caste tensions, student isolation, subtle discrimination and structural exclusion in recent times.

And then there are examples that are far more visible but still ignored. Toilet cleaners. Manual scavengers. Sanitation workers. Entire professions still silently reserved for certain castes. Not by written law, but by inherited expectation and social conditioning. We enjoy clean cities, polished apartments and hygienic spaces while never asking who is cleaning the human waste of the nation and under what conditions.

This is where the glass floor becomes almost literal. Certain bodies are made to deal with what society considers impure, while others are taught from childhood that they must not even touch it. The work is essential, yet the worker is made invisible. They become function, not human. And that separation is not accidental, it is taught, normalised and repeated over generations. The irony is that these people are closest to the actual functioning of the city, yet farthest from any form of dignity or recognition. The city runs because they exist, but the city also pretends they do not.

This is not just about occupation, it is about psychological placement. Who we subconsciously consider “fit” for certain work, who we see as capable of authority, who we imagine in positions of power. The glass floor doesn’t just divide physical space, it determines imagination itself.

The glass floor can also be extended to gated communities people have created for themselves. I’ve observed it first hand. It is widely known to have landlords not give homes to people from specific community based on their religion-caste, even when they are financially competant. The phrase like “I want to give it only to vegetarian” automatically filters out someone from muslim or lower caste background. This then isn’t illegal since it remains verbal, but it continues unchecked. Over time entire areas start forming like invisible borders, creating social enclaves that pretend to be neutral while functioning as filters. Slowly, segregation becomes geography.

Sex, marriages and patriarchy

Patriarchy and caste system go hand in hand. The author explains casteism in marriages with far stronger language than I am willing to use here, but the point remains clear. Marriages in India are not just about love, they are about preserving purity, lineage and social order. Even when people claim they are “different” from their parents, the patterns quietly repeat themselves.

During college my female friends used to say laughingly and in a light tone, “My parents have given me all the permission to marry anyone I want, except a Muslim guy.” At that time, it didn’t made much impact on me. Such neglect is unfortunately common to indian muslims. But slowly I realised the deeper implication. That “anyone” was never actually anyone. It was still bounded by caste logic, even if they framed it as religion. And what made it more complicated was how normal it sounded when said casually, almost proudly.

I strongly feel my female friend and her parents wouldn’t ever let her marry someone from lower caste, even if she rebelled. In her mind the divide is between religion and not caste, because all she has mostly seen in higher education spaces are savarnas. That visibility itself shapes what feels “acceptable”. And in that way, caste doesn’t just control marriage, it controls imagination. If this sounds harsh, I should warn you before reading author’s sentences. India is divided, at every level, not just financially but also intellectually and socially, by this same glass floor.

What makes this even more uncomfortable is how even supposedly “non-casteist” youth continue to follow caste rituals without openly admitting it. Not because they believe in purity or hierarchy, but because the system rewards those who stay inside it. Marriage within caste is still one of the easiest ways to preserve social capital. It keeps the network alive. It ensures access to family businesses, inherited clients, professional recommendations, financial backing and social credibility. In many cases, love is not just personal, it is also strategic.

What looks like tradition on the surface often functions as networking underneath. Staying within caste quietly keeps doors open, for jobs, partnerships, funding, alliances and opportunities that would otherwise remain inaccessible. So even youth who claim to reject caste ideology still participate in it because it offers stability and upward mobility. The system survives not only through belief, but through convenience. And that is perhaps the most disturbing part, that caste no longer needs faith to sustain itself, only utility.

Mediocrity of Millennials

Millennials, especially savarnas, could never create an India which was bound to be successful by 2020. The vision 2020 model failed and now the dream is pushed to 2047. The book explains the reasoning behind it. Savarnas failed to consider the actual reality of India. Most of the economic developments happened for and in favor of those who already had access. The vision was never inclusive, only aspirational for a selected few.

Take Mumbai for example. In the last 5–10 years, Mumbai has seen dramatic change. Skyscrapers multiplied, it now has two international airports, a parade of highways like the Eastern Expressway, the Mumbai Coastal Road project, Trans Harbour Link (Atal Setu), the Worli Sea Link, expanding metro networks, monorail experiments, and countless new projects. Almost ₹5 lakh crore of investment is projected across current and upcoming infrastructure. Ideally this should reflect in the lives of everyone. But that’s hardly the case.

Most of Mumbai remains divided on religious and caste grounds as well as economic class. Even after so much investment, Mumbai locals remain as suffocating as they were decades ago. Introducing AC trains hasn’t solved the structural problem. Almost 50% of the population still lives in slums. A large part of the population cannot afford personal vehicles, yet most infrastructure prioritises cars. The city looks futuristic from afar, but functions archaically at ground level.

The glitter of new roads is quickly washed out by potholes. Traffic congestion remains intact. What politicians proudly show are roads connecting non-slum areas to other non-slum areas. Bullet trains, premium airport lounges, flyovers, all look impressive on brochures but serve a narrow slice of society. This is where the author’s point about “vision India” rings painfully true. Development was imagined only for those already on top.

And this is where the idea of mediocrity comes in. Not mediocrity in effort, but mediocrity in imagination. The people who designed these visions were not stupid, they were efficient, educated and often well-meaning. But their idea of progress was painfully narrow. It did not question who the city was actually for. It did not imagine development from the perspective of the one hanging outside a packed train or the one living under a plastic sheet ten minutes away from a marble-floored mall.

Mumbai becomes a symbol here not just of inequality, but of shallow thinking dressed as ambition. Building more flyovers while your drainage system collapses is not vision, it is cosmetic intelligence. Creating premium metro lines while your basic bus system remains inaccessible is not progress, it is selective convenience. The city does not suffer from lack of intelligence, it suffers from lack of empathy in decision-making. And that lack is not accidental; it is deeply connected to who gets to sit in planning rooms and who does not.

This same mediocrity becomes even more visible when you look at how the modern business imagination is shaped. A large section of this imagination today comes from elite MBA institutions and corporate leadership programs. These individuals are highly trained in strategy, finance, market analysis and operational efficiency. The problem, however, is not competence, it is perspective.

Many MBAs are taught to understand India primarily through data models, consumer reports, segmented demographics and case studies. While these tools are valuable, they often remain disconnected from the lived realities of a vast majority of the population. As a result, business strategies are frequently designed based on statistically neat representations rather than complex social truth. India becomes a market abstraction rather than a society.

This becomes visible in the startup ecosystem as well. Instead of developing solutions rooted deeply in local conditions, many startups replicate existing global business models with slight localisation. The emphasis often remains on quick scalability, venture funding and urban consumption patterns, which naturally prioritise the spending capacity of the middle and upper classes. Meanwhile, sectors that demand long-term structural engagement, such as rural logistics, public health accessibility, affordable transportation and decentralised education, receive comparatively less sustained attention.

This problem of designing for the India they know, rather than the India that exists, continues to recur. The disconnect is so normalised that comments from elite founders working 70+ hours a week to “build the nation” are treated as heroic instead of being questioned as part of a broken work culture. As an IT professional, I’ve witnessed employee exploitation firsthand. Entry-level IT salaries have remained largely stagnant for the past 4–6 years, with many freshers still starting between ₹2.5–4 LPA, while inflation, rent and cost of living have risen sharply. At the same time, expectations have doubled, 10–12 hour workdays, weekend availability, unpaid overtime and constant performance monitoring are now treated as default behaviour rather than red flags.

The startup ecosystem reflects this imbalance clearly. Over the last few years, thousands of employees across major startups have been laid off as venture funding slowed and “growth at all costs” models collapsed. Many once-glittering startups that promised disruption are now either struggling to stay afloat, forced into mergers, or completely shut down. Even those that survive are facing quality deterioration, delayed salaries, toxic work environments and high burnout rates. What was once sold as innovation often turns out to be unsustainable experimentation funded by investor money and upheld by overworked labour. The system continues to celebrate hustle and vision while conveniently ignoring the growing instability it creates for the very workforce that keeps it running. There’s little to no creativity or innovation. The percentage of investment in research reveals the priorities of those supposedly building our nation.

This is how mediocrity operates. It looks grand, but thinks small. It avoids structural questions and settles for surface solutions. And that, according to the book, is exactly how savarna-led development continues to function, impressive in presentation, shallow in inclusion.

Savarnas continue to ignore the fact that India has two realities, one struggling for basic survival and another dreaming of becoming New York or Shanghai. And only one of those realities is being heard, celebrated and infrastructurally supported.

Gen Z and mass migration

As an old Gen Z, I’ve witnessed this first hand. Almost all of my college friends left to work or study abroad. And it was no surprise because it was in their plans from the first day of college. It wasn’t a sudden decision, it was a slow, carefully constructed roadmap that everyone around them silently approved of. The savarna Gen Z, like the author explains, have been raised in gated urban environments with little exposure to the remaining 90% of India. Their idea of the country is filtered through air-conditioned classrooms, curated textbooks and Instagram activism.

The goal of the indian education system, especially for this section of society, feels painfully simple: survive till 15–17, crack an elite institute (preferably IIT or a top private college), then move to US or Europe, do your masters, find a job and quietly disappear into the global crowd. Maybe return for marriage. Maybe bring the spouse back abroad, or post nostalgic pictures on Instagram about “missing home” while being structurally detached from it.

This isn’t just individual ambition, it has become a socially celebrated life-plan. Parents encourage it. Teachers romanticise it. Institutions design themselves around it. Success is measured by how far you can go, not by how deeply you engage with where you come from.

Gen Z, having lived in gated societies, never really lived among or played with lower class peers. They went to international schools or elite private institutions which claim to teach broader skillsets, while government schools, where most lower-class children study, remain looked down upon as inferior. Exposure to poverty often came in the form of CSR drives or school-organised slum visits, where hardship was observed like a documentary and then forgotten by the next Monday.

They were never truly exposed to harsh realities, only to controlled versions of them. And that makes a difference. You cannot emotionally understand what you only ever saw from a bus window. You cannot build a country you were trained to escape from. Again, while writing this down, I include myself in this category without hesitation because I realise how much of my own worldview was built inside the same bubble.

This detachment is not just about geography, it is about ownership. When people emotionally disengage from the country, they also disengage from its responsibility. The desire to leave is often framed as ambition, but the book makes you wonder how much of that ambition is actually escape from confronting uncomfortable realities.

Gen Z migration therefore becomes more than a personal choice; it becomes a structural symptom. The people raised with the most access, the most exposure, the most opportunity are also the ones most prepared to leave. And the ones who remain, those who carried the weight of this country from the beginning, are expected to continue sustaining it with minimal voice in shaping its direction.

The author also showcases the effect of this so-called “modernity” on Gen Z and how they seem to be living two parallel lives, and how that contradiction has somehow become normal. On one end, on platforms like LinkedIn and inside office spaces, they appear extremely liberal, forward-thinking, obsessed with building the future through artificial intelligence, robotics, modern healthcare and climate consciousness. They speak the language of innovation, sustainability and progress with complete fluency.

But on the other end, they are equally drawn towards astrology, mythology and hyper-spiritual nostalgia. Podcasts like BeerBiceps rising in popularity, discussing aliens, ancient gods, miraculous powers and lost civilisations, are not just harmless entertainment, they reflect a deeper longing. While this often becomes a joke among elite circles, there is an underlying emotional attachment to an imagined past, a time which they subconsciously believe was more glorious, more ordered, more “pure”. A time when, in their perception, savarnas ruled and the nation had its “true” identity, before it was supposedly diluted by colonialism and religious invasions.

What’s worrying is that this contradiction is not questioned. It is comfortably lived. They proudly perform modernity while simultaneously romanticising regression. And the deeper structures that shape this split, caste, historical power, selective memory, are either avoided or conveniently ignored. The version of “modern India” seen on social media is not real India, but a polished fragment of it. And savarna Gen Z never truly has to confront that gap, because the option of a foreign visa always exists, an escape route that allows them to opt out of discomfort rather than engage with it.

So when the author ends on a rather sad note, suggesting that savarnas will eventually leave this country and that only non-savarnas will lead it, I found myself disturbed yet unable to completely reject the idea. The so-called builders of this country might simply walk away, leaving the labourers to finally become decision-makers.

And maybe that is what this country was always meant to be, but never allowed to become. Even though I want to strongly disagree with the author about some of the points he has laid out (and generalized knowingly), I still feel this book is worth reading for someone who has no idea about the caste system beyond the headlines and political debates. It is beautifully written and well articulated.