ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a study of youth in six cities and demonstrates an unintentional or calculated indifference to the "theft" on the part of these youth. It attempts to show the ways they navigate urban space — ways that are not easily included within the constantly shifting frontiers of accumulation and political normalcy, and as such reorder the conventional terms through which life in the city is spoken about and experienced. A sense of detachment may be found in the city's "floating populations", where floating describes the way youth, in particular, circulate through scores of jobs, cheap room rentals, neighborhoods, and styles of engagement. The chapter also focuses on some of the practices deployed by some youth in Jakarta and Hyderabad to navigate an urban milieu that seems to be simultaneously replete with precariousness and possibility.
