Young men enrol in large numbers in these dysfunctional colleges to acquire the degrees needed to apply for salaried jobs, mainly in the government and public sector. Young women, on the other hand, are usually sent to college to improve their marriage prospects, not to try to qualify for employment, but Jeffrey was mostly unable to work with them. Unfortunately for graduates, the number of jobs is dwarfed by the number of applicants – sometimes several thousand apply for a lowly government post – and success is almost unattainable anyway without having the right political connections and paying large bribes. As a result, the vast majority of graduates cannot get jobs. A minority return to their family farms, which they regard as demeaning, but many enrol for another degree in the hope that it will improve their employment prospects. Some stay on for years, acquiring several BA and MA degrees and even a PhD, and then, still unemployed, they continue to live in a college hostel, spending their time completing job application forms, doing a bit of part-time work, engaging in student politics, and hanging out on and around the campus with other young men in the same predicament. All these activities, as well as much of the pointless studying they may do, are forms of timepass.

Many male students, says Jeffrey, see themselves as ‘surrounded by an expanse of featureless time’ (p. 76) which somehow has to be killed with distractions. They are chronically bored in their unfulfilling educational environment, but also feel left behind in provincial Meerut, where signs of India’s new global modernity are sadly absent. Almost all students look for ways of killing time, but those who had failed to get middle-class jobs and remained in higher education for long periods talked most often, usually forlornly, about timepass.

A common form of timepass is hanging out in small groups with other young men, for example, at the tea shops on the edge of the college campuses. There they trade stories, gossip, argue about sports, films and the news, drink tea and smoke cigarettes, enact mock fights and get into real ones, lounge around watching the world go by, crack jokes, leer at young women and sexually harass them. Most female students naturally try to avoid these male groups and justifiably complain that timepass is ruining the colleges; young women do not indulge in activities classified as timepass because, it is assumed, women never have idle time to kill. Like similar forms of sociality among young men elsewhere in the world, timepass in Meerut also ‘offered young men a feeling of fun, social worth and lower-middle-class masculine distinction’, and sometimes hanging out even provided useful information and contacts, while also tending ‘to reproduce gendered forms of power’ (p. 101).6 Timepass, in other words, functions socially to form a distinctive, class-based, male youth culture in Meerut. Yet the negative aspects of timepass are overwhelming: a chronic feeling of loss caused by educational disappointment and persistent joblessness, which in turn delays young men’s marriages, and a strong sense of indefinite waiting in unstructured time that means that many men ‘had come to imagine themselves occupying a semi-permanent condition of limbo’ (p. 177). Timepass for them is not a short-term activity to deal with a tedious patch; rather, it is both a response to and an expression of an interminable boredom dominating their subjective experience and shaping their very being. Among young men in Bangalore hoping to find work in the booming information technology sector, timepass is similar, though somewhat less chronic7. Comparable, too, is the situation in Bhilai where the school-educated sons of workers in the steel plant regularly wait for years hoping to get a job. Some of them study for degrees but ‘the vast majority have time on their hands’. Time is killed by playing card games or the local numbers racket, for example, but these young men also drink a lot and some become involved in crime or violence.8 Almost certainly, these forms of timepass and boredom are prevalent among millions of educated, unemployed young men throughout India. Educated unemployment has long existed in India, but it has been worsening significantly since the 1970s; it is a new problem for the families of many young men trapped by unemployment, because their fathers or grandfathers typically looked after family farms or worked as peasant agriculturalists or labourers, and did not aspire to white-collar or factory employment that they could not secure.

"Many recreational forms of timepass are enjoyable and many are harmless, but others – like those described by Jeffrey – are expressions of a soul-destroying boredom now afflicting millions of educated, unemployed young men in India today."

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This conclusion is admittedly more speculative than certain. The limited material on timepass, both as activity and discourse, does point to it being a quite recent, urban response to boredom, which was presumably perceived as growing; timepass, as Rajagopal says, is ‘a refuge from and a measure of boredom’.9 Thus the emergence of timepass can be read as a kind of proxy for the expansion and intensification of boredom, which is probably now occurring throughout India. Many recreational forms of timepass are enjoyable and many are harmless, but others – like those described by Jeffrey – are expressions of a soul-destroying boredom now afflicting millions of educated, unemployed young men in India today.