savitha

Some late observations: 1. Students love a good fight. Esp. when it’s unfair and they are the underdogs. Plus they love community - a highly valuable state of mind available to the modern human only for a few years of youth. No money can buy those hormones. 2. Sense of humour is a great weapon against fanatics. It disarms the opponent and heals the oppressed. And most importantly, gets you Instagram views. 3. Father figures, constantly telling a nation what to eat, who to marry, who not to love etc, are easy to dislike and unite against. 4. Mainstream media committed a mass-sepukku by agreeing to peddle just the govt. narrative over the last decade. So much so that on most policy issues, they are more conservative and bigoted than the government itself. It did two beautiful things - one, a big chunk of population started switching off, and two, the government itself ended up dumping them in the end, by negotiating with genuine protests already labelled as aatankwaadi by the news TV. On most occasions they make govt’s job more difficult than easy. Today - watching news TV is seen as one of the most uncool, low IQ things by a majority of the population. 5. Cuss words are no longer the underground culture they were a decade ago. (Even Gangs of Wasseypur was like 14 years ago.) Access to international rap, desi hip hop, more than 100 Indian comedians not censoring their language, even when they censor their thoughts, and in some cases political patronage to the cuss-heavy influencers have made sure that the language on the street is no more purist/sanitised. The more it shocks the authority figures, the more it will be used. 6. An aura - carefully built over a decade - took a fortnight to burst into smithereens. That’s how flimsy it was.