Poonam - Dreamers: how young Indians are changing their world

I T MIGHT BE any other editorial meeting, in any of a million new clickbait start-ups: a set of editors huddled around a table to discuss what news and gossip to feed their audience next. The process is quick and brutal. Ideas are thrown around like bids on a trading floor:

Why your best friend is your true love, just like Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher.

This is what you need to know about AmandaJustin Biebers new girlfriend.

How your face would look if you survived a car crash.

Fifteen times Donald Trump was trolled hilariously.

Fifteen minutes is all it takes the team to go over the whole range of American obsessions, from Kardashians to belly fat, from sex confessions to life hacks; and fifteen seconds is the average time they spend making a decision. Poor Amanda is peremptorily ditched for Victoria Beckham, who has just kicked up a parenting scandal by posting a photo on Instagram in which she is kissing one of her children. The editors opt for a bold stand, and argue the former Spice Girl did nothing wrong. Or, as the published article will later put it, This is why kissing your kids on the lips is not a bad idea. They have a reason for choosing the story: Child kissing is trending in the US, a young woman wearing black eyeshadow informs the room. The car crash idea is tweaked to imagine the impact of two car crashes on someones face at once. Everyone agrees it should only be a visual story. Americans, apparently, simply adore accident horror. Kim Kardashian loses out to Kylie Jenner. Another enterprising young woman volunteers a DIY experiment as research for the story How to get lips like Kylie Jenner without going under the knife. (Kylie Jenner lip challenge is also, apparently, trending.) No changes to the last itemDonald Trump is, of course, always hot. Ideas are approved not because of their news value but on account of how they appeal to base emotions. And in this quarter of an hour, these ten youngsters have tapped into the whole range of American emotional triggers: what excites Americans, what terrifies them, what makes them sad, and what makes them curious.

This isnt an editorial meeting somewhere in the US. Everyone here is less than twenty-three years old, and theyre perched in an all-glass office in a shopping mall in Indore, a medium-sized city in central India. Theyre deciding, a few hours before America wakes up, what it will read when it does.

They are hardly ever wrongor so say the numbers. Millions of people visit their website, WittyFeed, every day. Of them, 80 per cent are foreigners and half these people are from the US. WittyFeed is one of the worlds fastest-growing content farms; over a billion people follow it on Facebook alone. The only website of its kind visited by more people is BuzzFeed, the world leader in viral content. Currently valued at only 30 million dollars, WittyFeed is giving itself a couple of years to beat BuzzFeed. Thats not its ultimate goal, though. What the plucky youngsters who run it want to do is to build the worlds largest media company (bigger than BBC, CNN). How do they hope to do it? By following their maxim: Its emotion that goes viral.

Few people have heard of WittyFeed, even in India. The only reason Im here is because I noticed its crazy numbers: 82 million monthly visits, 1.5 billion page views, 170 million users, 4.2 million likes on Facebook. WittyFeed is news by the same parameter that it uses to define news: the WTF factor. How can a bunch of kids in a small Indian town who have never seen the world dream of ruling it by simply getting the internet better than anyone else?

In May 2016, I went to Indore to decide for myself if WittyFeed could indeed become the biggest media company in the world. Whether or not I found an answer to that question, I would at least get to hang out with a bunch of Indians who live in the internet. Flying in from Delhi, Indore looks small along every dimension: the width of its roads, the height of its buildings, the price of one nights stay at a mid-scale hotel. The signs of aspiration are all there, however. Cool coffee shops are coming up on cow-populated lanes; rock concerts are advertised on billboards; and youngsters wander its streets in Instagram-ready outfits.

But Indores new spirit of enterprise peaks in WittyFeeds 10,000-square-foot office on the ninth floor of the towns tallest commercial tower. It is decorated in a wide-eyed image of Silicon Valley. The walls are a canvas for everything central to the companys self-image, from an elaborate graphic illustration of WittyFeeds journey to icons of their favourite social media companiesFacebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and Snapchatto the collage of a start-up alphabet (creativity, crazy, courage...). Between these colourful walls, the open-plan office is a window into the companys hopeful, global soul: exposed brick and espresso machine, beanbags and a ping-pong table, a corner where the employees can wind down and an enclosure where they can work out. The office is designed such that, if youre not staring into your slim laptop, youre forced to look at something inspirational. Something thats meant to make an employee think as big, and American, as possible. It could be the blown-up face of a celebrityMarilyn Monroe, perhaps, or Madonna. It could be nuggets of espresso-shot motivation99.9 per cent is not 100 per cent or Set Goal. Reach. Repeat. Or it could be a triptych of the most inspiring Americans according to WittyFeedAbraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Should they be hit by self-doubt amid this architecture of inspiration, all they have to do is stand outside the office of the companys CEO and look at the image of an enormous Aladdin voicing the words that power millions of dreams across India every day: The universe is a genie... it always says, your wish is my command. The CEOs office has a name: Winterfell. So do the bathrooms: the mens is called Khal and the womens Khaleesi. Like the violent medieval world of