Skilling the Self: Personality Development in a Globalised Delhi

Abstract

Notwithstanding the increasing importance accorded to skilling and soft skills by the Indian state through its policies and institutions, there exist several private institutes in Delhi offering a course called personality development (PD). PD classes, as soft skills training, aim to teach embodied expressions of professionalism. PD courses seek to enable aspiring youth ways to access new spaces of employment and new sites of leisure in a globalised India. An average PD course includes soft skills training in the form of attitude correction, motivation, communication skills, bodily training, and stress management. This article examines a PD class catering to the relatively caste and class-privileged youth in Delhi. Through an ethnography of a PD institute, I show how PD is not about the exclusive production of youth who are market-ready and eminently employable. By focusing on PD as personal/personality development with holistic training of the self, I understand skilling as resulting in an intensification of entrepreneurial practices and subjectivities in people’s personal lives. Through lessons in communication skills, attitude and time management, I show how caste is translated into apparent forms of linguistic capital and social class that align with the sensibilities of emerging opportunities and spaces of consumption in a rapidly globalising Delhi.