James Pochury
Simran and Jiren are Adivasi youth who carry their ancestors in their bones, know their people’s history in their cells, and can trace their relationship to land and community with perfect clarity but cannot live any of “it.”
They are drinking water in a dream – the knowledge is there, the identity is intact, but the thirst for actually “being” Indigenous never stops. This is the crisis of urban Indigenous youth in India: not oppression, but impossibility; not loss of identity, but the unbearable gap between knowing who one is and having any way to be “it” fully.
The struggle: Drinking water in a dream
The entire planet is facing a climate crisis because humanity chooses “having more” over “being more” – more consumption, growth, performance, achievement. Earth’s civilization now is one that extracts, accelerates, fragments, and calls it progress.
Indigenous ways of being – rooted in land, relationships, cultural integrity, in “enough” – are what could save humanity not as a romantic past, but as a viable future. The world needs people who know how to “be” instead of just to “have.”
And they cannot live “it”
Simran and Jiren know this not because anyone stops them but because everything pulls them in the other direction.
Their education teaches competition and achievement. Their families need success the world recognizes such as jobs, stability, and security. Their city has no rhythm for “being more,” only the frantic pace of “having more.” Survival requires participation in a system that their indigeneity questions.
Simran studies chemistry not because it connects her to her people’s knowledge, but because it is a path forward in a world that measures progress in credentials and income. Jiren prepares for competitive exams not because these honor who he is but because these are the gates to a future that might give stability to his family.
Indigenous people living Indigenous-less lives not by choice, but by necessity
This is what keeps them awake: “I know who I am. I know my language, land, history, culture. But where do I live this? When do I BE this when everything I do requires me to perform something else?”
Simran craves peace, not rest, the kind that comes from living in integrity with who one is actually is instead of who one needs to become to survive.
But peace requires space where indigeneity is not heritage one honors but reality one inhabits. Simran does not have that space as her life is performance – perform competence in chemistry, perform ambition, perform gratitude for opportunity, perform assimilation into rhythms that do not recognize Indigenous time, priorities, or ways of knowing.
The peace she craves requires she stops performing, but stopping means falling out of the only world available.
Who am I when the me I know needs a world that doesn’t exist?
Jiren is terrified of becoming unrecognizable to himself, not dramatically but in the slow accumulation of compromises. These include the gradual hardening due to living in competition instead of community, the loss of humility due to constantly proving one’s worth, the instrumentalization of relationships when everything becomes networking.
He can feel the pull toward “having more” happening because “being more” has no economic form, no social reinforcement, and no path that does not require sacrifice his family cannot afford.
Who am I when staying recognizable to myself means staying stuck?
They have not lost their indigeneity and they know it intimately but cannot manifest it fully. It lives in them as knowledge, memory, longing but not as life. They have emotions tied to land they’ve never lived on, a connection to history they can recite but not inhabit, a language they speak but cannot live in, and a culture they know but cannot practice fully.
It’s all there, all intact, yet none of it has ground. They are drinking water in a dream and the water is real, the thirst is real, but they never stop being thirsty.
The hope is in refusing to surrender
So why don’t Simran and Jiren give up?
The hope is not that they will succeed but that they refuse to stop trying.
Simran will not accept that performance is the only option. Even when she cannot fully live the peace she craves, she will not pretend the craving is weakness. She names it and she protects it. She refuses to call ambition without integrity as “growth.” She asks herself: “Who am I? I am someone who remembers what matters even when I cannot fully live it.”
Jiren will not accept that unrecognizability is inevitable. Even when the world rewards hardness, fragmentation, instrumentalization, he chooses – not perfectly, not completely, but deliberately – humility, wholeness, and relationships that are not transactional.
Who am I? I am someone who fights to stay recognizable even when the fight seems endless.
Simran and Jiren participated in global climate conversations – including COP31 processes – not to represent anyone, but to understand is they were alone in this and they learned that they are not alone.
This is the global Indigenous struggle. Everywhere, Indigenous Peoples are being forced to choose between cultural survival and economic survival, between being whole and being allowed to exist. And everywhere, there are those refusing to choose and to surrender. They live in the tension and holdthe question open even when the answer seems impossible.
The hope is not in the solutions but in the refusal to give up the question.
The challenge we cannot ignore
This is not about two struggling youth but about the central question of our time: Can human beings live with cultural integrity in the modern world or does “modern” require we all become performers in the “having more” race?
For Simran and Jiren, this is the daily, grinding reality – the impossibility of manifesting who you know you are, the thirst that won’t stop in knowing one is Indigenous but never fully living it.
The world needs their refusal not because they will solve anything but because every person who keeps asking “Who am I?” instead of accepting “having more” is protecting the possibility that another way of being human can survive.
Simran’s craving for peace is not weakness. It’s a memory of what human life should be. Jiren’s fear of becoming unrecognizable is not anxiety. It is the protection of something essential. If they surrender fully to the rat race, the world loses two more people who might have shown that cultural integrity is still possible.
And the world cannot afford that loss
Simran and Jiren are living the hardest question Indigenous Peoples face in the 21st century: How do we BE Indigenous when there is no ground to be it on?
They don’t have the answer but they have not stopped asking. That is the hope and that is what matters, not for themselves but for all of us.
James Pochury is from Nagaland, India and is the RAOEN Regional Coordinator for South Asia.