The young have given up, we have given up on them

Around two or three years ago, the young of this country, disgusted at and disenchanted by what was and is happening around them, resolved on seeking greener pastures. Elsewhere. Abroad. It’s a startling trend at one level, but one that was expected for a long, long time.

 They have given up on the country that bred them, given up on the morals and polemics they were taught from an early age to respect, and while many of them are trying to strike at what they want in here, a great many others have yielded to their impulses and decided to complete their A Levels, get into a local university if possible, and once that’s done, pack their bags and pursue their higher education, careers, and marriages elsewhere.

   
Consider the statistics. 4.5 million or 25% of this country is comprised of the young, i.e. those between the ages of 15 and 29 years. I’ve had the good fortune of meeting so many of them during the last five or six years, particularly through stints at journalism and freelance writing, and I’ve had the good fortune of discovering the hidden talents, the untapped potentials, of this demographic. No matter what fields they want to take to – from engineering to writing to photography to rapping to advertising – they are sincerely eager to get rid of the conventional wisdoms that exist in their societies and take the culture of their country to the next level. The elders have decided to rebel against these inclinations, but that has anyway been the case in other societies too. In Sri Lanka, however, a deeper problem exists: the absence of a proper leadership to represent them, and more to the point, to represent who they want to become. 

 
And if this is the main reason for their decision to leave the country, they couldn’t have picked a better time and yet a worse time: better because the country is in such a rut that the only way to escape it is to escape it literally, and worse because the world we’re in, and the countries these youngsters want to depart to, are being ridden by restriction after restriction, imposed as a result of what is considered to be the failures of multiculturalism and assimilation in those societies. We have moved, in other words, from Obama’s America to America First and Brexit. The youth, in other words, have nowhere to turn to; unless they act and move fast, they won’t be in a position to realise what they want. They have given up, but don’t know where else to turn to.

 
A conundrum.   

In Sri Lanka, however, a deeper problem exists: the absence of a proper leadership to represent them, and more to the point, to represent who they want to become

Brain drains have always been a problem for Sri Lanka (just look at the minds from here at work, in big companies and organisations, elsewhere), and yet, even with that, this new impending spate of youth defections worries me more than anything else. In a context where those in charge of youth affairs are (for the lack of a better way of putting it) too old, too mellowed, to understand the affairs of the young, and in a context where the general polity of the country has splintered between two political camps, neither of which has any clue as to where they want to take us to, it’s understandable that the young have given up. (The ardently political among this demographic, naturally enough, still bat for the side they’re on, but the apolitical segment of that demographic, who despise politics in general but love the culture they’ve been born to, hate both sides.)   

If 25% of this country leave in the future, when they’ve picked up the skills and the habits they need to wade through the world, the brain drain they will compel will be quite unlike any other we have faced until now. Most of those who will leave, barring those who have no real future in terms of higher education (i.e. those who didn’t study in local schools and hence have to go abroad to pursue what they want), would have picked those skills up courtesy of an education system that was free, or free in terms of the costs they didn’t have to pay for and the bills that others footed for their schooling. It was the taxpayer who paid for their textbooks and teachers, the taxpayer who made them go through those 12 years from primary school to A Levels. Ultimately, all that money, all those costs, would have been for nothing: what they resulted in was a culture whereby those who learn to become professionals decide that enough is enough and pack their bags. If that’s not a waste of money and resources, I don’t know what is. 

Brain drains have always been a problem for Sri Lanka (just look at the minds from here at work, in big companies and organisations, elsewhere), and yet, even with that, this new impending spate of youth defections worries me more than anything else

 
And I think it’s convenient for us to blame the politician, when the problem lies elsewhere. Personally speaking, I can’t think of leaving my country, not because of some false consciousness of a non-existent superiority of this culture, but because there’s no other society we can call our own. Worldly achievement and material success, however, are two big reasons why we are ready to become lotus-eaters. There’s something ironically contradictory about a country that can give so much – we are a nation of smilers despite the most obvious odds stacked against us – and yet force us to leave it because of those who lead it. If we don’t fix this now, we’ll never fix it. The young will leave us. For good and forever.