ABSTRACT
One hot summer evening in 2006, while I was conducting ethnographic research in the Indian steel town of Jamshedpur, I received a somewhat mysterious telephone call from a close research participant. I had come to Jamshedpur to investigate the relationship between trade-union corruption and the decline of permanent industrial employment, and my work brought me into contact with many people like the man I was speaking with. Known to his friends as Lucky, he was the twenty-one-year-old jobless son of a retired industrial worker.1 Like many of his peers, he sought to elevate himself above the ranks of India’s unemployed by investing his father’s early-retirement settlement in a variety of business ventures. The tone of Lucky’s call was vague: he asked simply that I meet him that evening in a local bar to discuss a ‘personal problem’.
