It's a young country, bubbling with youth. It's a young country all set to stand at par with its big daddy. And it's also a young country that carries a huge ugly belly with poverty and unemployment as its babies. Wondering about the name? No prizes for guessing, it's the world's largest democracy with about 51 % of its population of 1.15 billion younger than 25.

Welcome to India. Better call it the `Young India'.

And with the fact that tens of millions of these Indians are expected to vote for the first time this spring, in India's parliamentary elections, not much is required to explain the role of youth punch in this election.

The last Parliamentary elections saw some promising youngsters making it to the parliament and taking the house by storm a couple of times (read Rahul Gandhi's speech in parliament, Omar Abdullah's five-minute flow of strong words and a few more of them), but the bigger question is, did all of that affect how the country functions?

Categorically the answer is both yes and no.

`No' because few young guns who are often treated as the guys with `hot heads and less experience' cannot always influence the senior party leaders and govern the policymaking. So that way nothing sweeping happened even though the ruling party had a good number of promising young leaders. However having said that, the young leaders did manage to shape and change a couple of things. The modernisation of post offices across the country is a simple example of that thanks to Union Minister of State for Communication and Information Technology, Jyotiraditya Scindia. And very few would disagree on the growing clout of Rahul Gandhi among the urban and rural masses. And mind you, it's not happening just in vacuum.

According to a recent media report, with 65 % of India's voters being under the age of 35 (including one hundred million first-time voters), the young make up a sizeable chunk of the electorate and the Indian electorate of 2009 will be the youngest since 1952.

So that way thoughts of young Indians having an inclination towards the young leaders is quite obvious. A clear cut indication of the fact is the projection of young Rahul Gandhi as the face of the Congress against the 81-year-old veteran, L K Advani. So does that mean that the youth has arrived in Indian politics and the country is set to witness a drastic change?

Ask the voters, and not many agree to that. They believe that Indian politics is undergoing a phase of transformation exactly the way Indian cricket has been undergoing for a couple of years now, where old and the young have played together and took the team to heights.

Source: www.dayafterindia.com Young Blood Matters: Welcome To India. Better Call It The `Young India'

''But certainly (the expectations was) not of this level. Questions (asked by her students at this one off class) were really stimulating,'' Horsley, Deputy Director, The China Law Centre, told NDTV.Com, soon after her class, which lasted for 120 minutes inside Yale University Campus, got over.

Unlike her routine classes, sitting in front of her were spokespersons of two major national political parties Abhishek M Singhvi of Congress and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi of BJP, the Minister of State for Communications Jyotiraditya Scindia, the former Union Minister Suresh Prabhu and media barons like Shobhana Bhartia - nominated to Rajya Sabha. These MPs are in the US as part of the 2008 India-Yale parliamentary Leadership Programme.

During their week-long stay in the US, these Indian parliamentarians would be exposed to a series of academic sessions over a period of four days followed by a wide range of meetings with politicians, think tank and government officials in Washington. The programme was launched last year in collaboration with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the India-US Forum of Parliamentarians. This is the second batch of MPs.

"We told him that people have many expectations from the UPA government including on issues relating to employment," Navin Jindal said after the interaction with Singh at his official residence at seven, Race Course Road.