Beyond Skills: Giving Teenagers a Compass for the Future

Think about the hashtag#teenager in your home or near you. Smart, capable, digitally fluent, and at the same time also overwhelmed in ways they cannot name. We live in a hashtag#VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous). hashtag#AI has turbocharged these as it rewrites entire industries between one school year and the next. A young person today will navigate careers, relationships, and ethical choices that no previous generation has a map for. And into this storm, we are sending them armed with information and skills, but almost no internal compass.

Every civilisation that lasted long enough to be worth studying understood that hashtag#puberty is the precise moment to hand a young person that compass. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah assigns a 13-year-old with an important responsibility. From this day, you are answerable for your own actions. Similarly, the Aboriginal Walkabout sends a boy into the wilderness alone for months, to deepen his connection to identity and belonging before he returns as a man. Japan’s Seijin Shiki gathers every young person who has turned 20 and says collectively: you belong to this society now. You owe it something.

Indian Culture had its own answer, the hashtag#Janeu or hashtag#Upanayan sanskar just before hitting puberty. Upanayan means bringing near, bringing a young person into proximity with dharm, with their own deeper nature. The child receives the sacred thread, taught the Gayatri mantr, and is formally initiated into student life under a guru. In South India, the Ritu Kala Samskaram marks the same threshold for girls. These are civilisational frameworks designed at exactly the moment a young person most needs one. There is nothing stopping us from removing any caste, religion and gender barrier from this sanskar, is there? Who will say no for this to their child? Gargi underwent it. Maitreyi underwent it.

At the heart of the Upanayana is hashtag#Vivek, the faculty of discernment, the ability to distinguish hashtag#dharm from adharm, right action from merely convenient action. A young person with Vivek does not get overwhelmed by VUCA. They read it, they develop appropriate frameworks and become capable of seeing around corners, prepare for what may be coming, and make their moves with steadiness and purpose. That is a very different thing from anxiety, from reactivity, from the paralysis that so many young people carry today without even knowing why.

Most Indian families still perform the Upanayan, but the gap between ritual and meaning is the gap an entire generation is falling through.

hashtag#EduCulture proposes to close it. A young person shaped by their civilisational inheritance does not need to be told how to behave in a VUCA world. They already carry the framework. They know what changes and what stays constant. They can take advantage of what is coming without losing their sense of what is right.

When did we decide that producing skilled people was enough, and stopped asking whether we were producing good ones?

From Anger to Action: Why EduCultured Youth Need Vivek to Lead Change

From Anger to Action EduCultured Youth and the Power of Vivek

Yesterday, a movement that calls itself the COCKROCH JANTA PARTY 🇮🇳 brought hundreds of young people to Jantar Mantar. Cockroach masks, exam guides, chants about education. Real anger, real energy, 20 million Instagram followers made flesh. And then, almost immediately, the conversation shifted because somebody had chosen June 6 as the date for the protest, and June 6 is the anniversary of Operation Blue Star. Within hours, the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan‘s alleged failures were no longer trending. The narrative moved to choice of date, manner of protest, type of slogans and even handling of Delhi heat!

The protest got hijacked by its own oversight and its opponents need not do anything, rather a clarification got circulated by Government of India that no FIR has been registered against protesters.

This is what happens when a generation that is genuinely brilliant at gathering attention has not yet learned the art of channelizing it. The anger at Jantar Mantar was real because the cause, exam irregularities that have cost lakhs of young people a fair shot at their future, was serious and it deserve a full hearing. I myself had to deal with IIT-JEE being cancelled in 1997 which had drained all motivation out of me to study further, just sheer luck that I cleared the re-exam after spending all that time sitting alone at home.

The CJP is a fascinating phenomenon precisely because it proves that Gen Z can mobilise at a scale that older political structures like Indian National Congress or Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) or even Aam Aadmi Party have lost the ability to imagine. Twenty million followers in under five days, Sonam Wangchuk showing up as an honorary cockroach. Even seasoned politicians scrambling to attach themselves to its energy. The gathering power is extraordinary. But power without Vivek is like a well-sharpened sword carried by someone who has not yet decided which direction they are walking. It cuts, but not necessarily what was intended.

Protest, when it is at its best, is a deeply cultural act. The Salt March worked because every detail of it was deliberate, the date, the route, the image of an old man walking, the salt itself as symbol. Gandhiji went beyond just feeling the injustice deeply, as he understood that feeling alone does not move history. The protest had to be a text that the whole country could read, and it was.

An EduCultured youth carries this understanding alongside the anger. The anger is the fuel, Vivek is the steering. My book, Freedom! Let Us Begin the Journey…, explores exactly this terrain, how inner clarity and outward action are not separate questions but one, and what our civilisational inheritance actually has to say to someone trying to live and act consciously in the world today.