This paper challenges us to consider the meaning of schooling for youth in the global south. We explore the ways in which young people living and learning on the outskirts of Kathmandu balance the visions and passions of modern schooling with social realities that are often quite incompatible. We depart from conventional analyses of modernity, evoking instead Baudrillard's concepts of hyper-reality, seduction and unintelligibility. In the process we move beyond the dichotomy of "local-global" in order to understand something of how globalisation is practised. Here, we see young people grabbling with what appear to be ambiguous identity projects where instability and uncertainty become basic conditions for life in societies characterised by connectivity and exclusion.