Contributed articles presented at a national seminar held at Aligarh on 1-2 May, 1991.

Social and economic changes around the globe have propelled increasing numbers of people into situations of chronic waiting, where promised access to political freedoms, social goods, or economic resources is delayed, often indefinitely. But there have been few efforts to reflect on the significance of "waiting" in the contemporary world. Timepass fills this gap by offering a captivating ethnography of the student politics and youth activism that lower middle class young men in India have undertaken in response to pervasive underemployment. It highlights the importance of waiting as a social experience and basis for political mobilization, the micro-politics of class power in north India, and the socio-economic strategies of lower middle classes. The book also explores how this north Indian story relates to practices of waiting occurring in multiple other contexts, making the book of interest to scholars and students of globalization, youth studies, and class across the social sciences.

This book explores the attitudes, anxieties and aspirations of India’s burgeoning young population in a globalised world. Drawing upon time-series survey data of the Indian youth aged between 15 and 34 years across 19 Indian states, it provides key insights into a range of themes along with an overview of the changing trends and patterns of their behaviour. The volume examines the job preferences of the Indian youth, their career priorities and opinions on reservations in employment and education sectors. It measures their degree of political participation and studies their attitude regarding political issues. It looks at aspects relating to their social and cultural contexts, preferences and practices, including lifestyle choices, consumption habits and social customs such as marriage, as they negotiate between tradition and modernity. Further, it discusses the anxieties and insecurities that the youth face, their mental health and their experiences of social discrimination. The essays here offer an understanding of a critical demographic and shed light on the challenges and opportunities that the Indian youth confront today. Lucid, accessible and empirically grounded, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of sociology, political sociology, political studies, youth psychology and anthropology as well as policymakers, journalists and the interested general reader.

Dynastic politics, usually presumed to be the antithesis of democracy, is a routine aspect of politics in many modern democracies. This book introduces a new theoretical perspective on dynasticism in democracies, using original data on twenty-first-century Indian parliaments. It argues that the roots of dynastic politics lie at least in part in modern democratic institutions - states and parties - which give political families a leg-up in the electoral process. It also proposes a rethinking of the view that dynastic politics is a violation of democracy, showing that it can also reinforce some aspects of democracy while violating others. Finally, this book suggests that both reinforcement and violation are the products, not of some property intrinsic to political dynasties, but of the institutional environment from which those dynasties emerge.