The hero everyone knows
Every village has a hero. You know the one. The boy who studied under a streetlight, cleared the exam, and came back in a car with a red light on top. His photo hangs on a banner at the crossroads. Mothers point at him and tell their sons, "Dekho, usse seekho."
Every city has its hero too. Every country has a list, and the whole world has a longer one. We know their struggles by heart. We know the exact year their luck turned, the exact sentence they said in the interview, the exact meal they skipped.
But nobody tells us about the others. The ones who sat under the same streetlight, with the same hunger, and never got the car. They did not run away, and they did not fail an exam of character. They are simply sitting in a room somewhere, a degree lying in a plastic file beside them, and nobody is asking how they are.
I am one of them. Maybe you are too.
The boy who was supposed to make it
I was never a weak student. Teachers wrote "excellent" in my diary. After parent-teacher meetings, my father would come home quiet, and I understood that quiet. It was pride that did not need words. Relatives said, "Ye to bahut aage jayega." I heard that sentence so many times that it stopped sounding like a guess. It became a promise I had made to everyone.
So I did what a good student does. I gave up cricket in the evenings. I skipped cousins' weddings in exam season. I learned to fall asleep with a book open on my chest. The marks came, and then a good college came, and then the course. B.Tech, BBA, BCA- it hardly matters which one. The name of the degree changes, but the promise stays the same: finish this, and life is set.
I believed it completely, because everyone around me did. My mother quietly stopped buying new clothes. My father took a loan and never told me the amount. I found out much later, by accident, from a bank paper lying in a drawer. I remember standing there holding that paper, and I understood for the first time what my degree really was. It was not mine alone. It was the whole family's savings, folded into four years.
On the day of convocation, I wore the gown, held the certificate and smiled for photographs. My mother cried. My father stood a little straighter than usual. I have looked at those photos many times since. I want to tell that boy something, but I do not know what. He looks so sure.
The silence after the degree
Nobody warns you about the silence.
For sixteen years, your life has a shape. Classes, tests, results, the next class. Then one day it all stops. No timetable, no teacher, no next step. Just you, a laptop, and a phone that does not ring.
You apply. You apply again. You apply to so many places that you forget which ones you applied to. Some never reply. Some say, "We will get back to you," and you wait by the phone like a fool, knowing it is foolish, waiting anyway. One posting asks for two years of experience for a fresher's post, and you stare at it for a long time. How do I get experience if no one will give me the first chance?
Once I got an offer. The salary was eight thousand rupees, in a city where my room rent alone was six. I would have taken it. I wanted to take it. Even that fell through.
The days begin to look the same. Wake up late, because why wake up early? Refresh the inbox. Scroll. Feel guilty about scrolling. Apply to two more places. Sleep. Wake up and do it again.
"Beta, aajkal kya kar rahe ho?"
The hardest question I have ever faced was not in any exam hall. It was asked by an uncle at a wedding, with a plate of food in his hand, in the most casual tone.
"Beta, aajkal kya kar rahe ho?"
Two seconds of silence. Then a smile that is not really a smile. "Bas, preparation chal rahi hai. Dekh raha hoon."
He nodded. But I could see the thought pass behind his eyes. Then came the comparisons, never meant to hurt and always hurting. "Sharma ji ka ladka toh Bangalore mein hai." "Tumhare cousin ko toh already package mil gaya." I kept smiling and kept eating, and the food tasted like nothing.
In that whole hall, full of people who loved my family, not one person asked, "Are you okay?"
Watching your dream live in someone else's life
Nobody talks about this part, so let me say it plainly.
A classmate posts a photo outside his new office. Another one writes a long post about being "humbled and grateful" for his first job. Someone buys a bike. Someone moves to a new city. Someone starts sending money home.
I sat next to these people in class. I borrowed their notes and lent them mine. We made the same plans on the same canteen bench. We wanted the same life.
I tap the like button. I type, "Congratulations bhai, well deserved." And the strange truth, the one nobody believes, is that I mean it. I am truly happy for him. But in the same moment, something inside me goes heavy and silent. Happiness and heartbreak can live in the same chest, and no one teaches you how to carry both.
It is not jealousy, exactly. It is grief. The dream I carried, the one I worked for, planned for and cried over, is being lived by someone else right in front of my eyes. The salary is not what hurts. What hurts is the distance between the person I thought I would be by now and the person sitting in this room.
What does it really take to become unemployed?
People think it takes laziness. Let me tell you what it takes.
It takes twelve years of school and the discipline to finish them. It takes entrance exams, coaching fees and a family that believes in you more than you believe in yourself. It takes four years of hostels, bad food and missed festivals. It takes a father's loan and a mother's silence. It takes the courage to open your laptop again after the hundredth rejection.
Nobody chooses this life. It happens in the gap between what we are taught and what the world asks for, between marks and skills, between a certificate and a chance. It is what happens when a country produces graduates faster than it produces opportunities.
The numbers say the same thing, though numbers are a cold way to say it. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023-24, about 10.2 per cent of young Indians between 15 and 29 were unemployed. The India Employment Report 2024, by the International Labour Organisation and the Institute for Human Development, also pointed out that educated young people make up a large share of the country's unemployed. But a percentage cannot show you a young man sitting on the staircase at 2 a.m., so that his parents will not hear him cry.
From "I have no job" to "I am nothing"
This is how it happens, slowly, and so quietly that you do not notice.
First the thought is, I have not found a job yet. That is a fact. A situation.
A few months later, it becomes: I am falling behind. That is a fear.
And one night, lying awake, it becomes: I am a failure. That is a verdict, and it is a lie. But by then you are too tired to argue with it.
I stopped picking up calls from friends. I stopped going to places where people might ask. I started keeping my phone on silent, and my life on silent too. Anyone who has lived through this will understand. You are not angry at the world. You are just too ashamed to be seen by it.
And the cruellest part is that outside, I looked completely fine. I ate with the family. I laughed at the jokes. I said, "Sab theek hai." Then I went to my room and sat in the dark for a while, rehearsing answers to questions nobody had asked yet.
The stories we forget to tell
I do not hate success stories. They gave me hope on many bad days, and I am grateful for each of them. Those people earned every bit of their applause.
But when a society only remembers the winners, it quietly tells everyone else that they lost. It forgets that for every boy who got the red-light car, there are a hundred who studied just as hard, believed just as much, and are still standing at the station, waiting for their train. They are not failures. They are stories that have not reached their good chapter yet.
I wish we asked them different questions. Not "What are you doing these days?" but "How are you holding up?" Not "Why have you not settled yet?" but "What do you need?" Sometimes a person does not need advice or another lecture on how great men struggled. They already know those stories by heart. They only need someone to sit beside them and stay long enough to hear the real answer.
The dream that is still here
I do not have a happy ending for you. I am still living this story, so I cannot lie about how it ends.
But I know a few things. Being unemployed is something a person is going through. It is not who a person is. My worth was never written on a salary slip. Someone else's success did not cancel my dream; it only reminded me that it was real. And the hero of every village, city and country was once unknown too. Before the applause, there was a long, lonely stretch that no one filmed.
Maybe that is where I am right now, and where you are, in the chapter nobody tells.
So the next time you meet a young person who is "doing nothing," please do not judge. Look a little closer. Behind that tired smile, there may be a boy who topped his class, a family that sold something to send him here, and a dream he has not given up on, even though he no longer says it out loud.
The world may never know our names. But we are still here. Still applying, still learning, still hoping, still getting up every morning and trying again. And I have started to believe that this, too, is a kind of courage.