Forgotten Dreams
During the phases of lockdowns in the time of covid, Indian
student community had to bear a two year long closure of edu-
cational institutions. While some of the economically privi-
leged urban and semi urban sector adapted to an online system
of education, it was soon very evident how the country was
never really equipped enough to take such a challenge, even
after the government’s chest thumping of a “Digital India”.
The sectors which needed education as a medium of socio eco-
nomic upliftment, thus, suffered the most. As stable internet
and digital devices and costly data plans became mandatory,
a section, due to the uncertainty of a future, and these new
challenges, took on to the process of working as cheap labour
and migrating to urban economic zones as unskilled workers. I
find this whole concept as shifting identity, death of aspi-
ration in terms of the development of society as a whole, and
also as an issue related to socio economic exploitation. As
the days pass on, these sectors with established scarcity of
resources thus strengthens the process of clear class divi-
sion.
My project intends to bring these faces and spaces into the
conversation in regards to failure of a system focusing on
a sector already equipped with key resources and cannot pro-
vide through the basic necessity of another. which treat this
phenomenon as just another normalised issue, where individual
dreams die as the victim of collective unrecognition, and a
future of a community regresses a few generations more.
In the process of exploring the concept of my project, I’d
like to portray the socio economic condition they live in
their community and also would follow them to their workplac-
es in big cities to make a visual document of their changed
aspirations from life.