ABSTRACT This study examines a lesser explored area of research involving the interaction between young people and culture in an Indian city, Pune. By looking at young peoples’ conceptions about the city and their everyday cultural participation, we show that the city is culturally divided on the lines of language, spatiality, class, and status, and these further interact with each other in complicated ways. For young people in Pune city, English and Marathi are set in an unequal relationship, however there is a disagreement on the place of these languages in this relationship. Further, the recent young migrants showed ‘in-betweenness’ in their cultural imaginations about the rural and the urban. Young people’s everyday cultural interactions happened through family, friends, and the internet. Diversities, inequalities, and tensions marked those processes. Their families’ differential access to cultural capital shaped their cultural socialisation and opportunities in cultural fields. They saw engagement with the digital world as inevitable; but recognising the difference between the virtual and the real worlds, they involved themselves in online debates only with persons with whom they had some real-world connections. We further show that along with socio-economic inequalities, young people are fragmented at the cultural level too, and they navigate these different cultural worlds.