The inter-generational dialogue, courtesy a protest movement

If I say suspended disbelief laced with respect was the upper most emotion in most adult/parents’ minds in the past two weeks at the scenes unfolding before them from New Delhi’s protest site, I may not be far from wrong. Screenagers, as they were scornfully called, were seen organized, empathetic and fighting the good fight for accountability. If every parent had been dismissive and anxious about the ‘appstraction’ and screentime, they were finally seeing a script play out on their phone screens, which was way different from what they had imagined. Messed up sleep schedules, finally came handy in night vigils spent singing songs and lampooning. 

History is rich with stories of the young contributing to India’s Independence movement. Vanar Sena, or the Monkey Brigade had a wide network acting as messengers and organizing prabhat pheri singing nationalist songs. Nandini Satpathy, former Chief Minister of Odisha, was just 8 when she pulled down the Union Jack and was beaten up for the same. Khudiram Bose was but 17 when he was hanged by the British. Leaders like JP Narayan, Vajpayee and many of the sitting chief ministers in various states, including VDS in Kerala and almost all before him, were once student leaders who rose through rank and file. In the West too, war efforts (both the first and second world wars) were augmented by the young, through organized networks of Scouts and Guides and other informal channels. I was 17 when Koothuparamba police firing in Kerala on protesting students killed five students and paralysed one.

The internet age had sounded alarm bells at how the young were losing their attention span and growing up insular with negligible human interaction. They were not playing on the streets and families were not talking at dinner table. Mobile phone bans seemed a natural solution to beat the addiction to the algorithm that was constantly spitting out content. Older people were worried, were angry and had nearly written them off, which is why the Jantar Mantar protest is a plot twist, to borrow from internet lingo. Jantar Mantar literally means an instrument to calculate and predict, and ironically, nobody could predict the turn of events. 

Much of the commentary on the protest movement by the citizen journalists was often riddled with a confusion on the co-existence of levity and humour alongside gravitas. Many posted about going to the protest movement with 2 back papers (meant they failed the university exams). ‘Protest date’ quickly became a thing and they posted about their single status and looking for leftist baddie to hang out with. There was badminton across barricades, street cricket and push-up duels. There were people dressed up as a spiderman, a dinosaur, a cockroach and a chimp. A white cloth swaddled Gandhi surfaced to lend a moral shot in the arm, albeit visually. A bunch of girls walked past a posse of CRPF policemen exclaiming how good looking they were. The coverage and recording of the minutiae meant that nothing went unnoticed. Not the parent of the child who had committed suicide, who amidst his tears, pledged support for the protesters. Many children brought their parents along and there was ample scope for communication and dialogue from people across generations, states and religions. 

The truth is that nobody expected this to last and by nobody, I mean the older adults, who were always sceptical of the digital natives. If attention span was 9 seconds or even lesser, could they stay focused on the issue at hand? But they sustained it, for more than a month. There was fear of violence, given the experience of youth movements in neighbouring countries. But when the visuals unfolded, nobody missed the students fanning an injured policeman or offering them roses, nor the policeman who escorted an injured student out into the footpath. Volunteers, suitably masked and gloved, cleared up garbage every day and girls reported the sense of safety they all experienced despite the large numbers. Unknown annadatas sent food and water and many who were college students during JP movement and the Emergency drew parallels. 

In no time, the older ones (boomers and all who came after) made posts full of self-reflection and lament about their failure in bringing the country to this state. They felt small, really small, one for their own apathy and another for having disbelieved their children. They, who had written off the GenZs gushed now in admiration. Many arrived at the protest site in their air-conditioned cars and clicked smiling pictures with the dishevelled youth who were sweating it out in the July heat. They examined their own relationship with power and politics. It was a typical denouement in any parent-child movie, where everybody comes of age when the penny drops. It was but a communication gap. 

While many of the elders barely understood the cultural reference points of GTA 6 or the vibe of I am a good girl officer from Playing Dangerous by Lana Del Ray, there were also pictures of Baba Sahib Ambedkar and Shahid Bhagat Singh. The music was mainly Bolly-Border, and plenty of AR Rahman -- Rang De Basanti and Rockstar. It was global and national at once, the young denizens freely flitting in and out borderlessly. They felt no qualms in putting wild abuses on the posters, references to love, sex and dhoka ran plenty, and if anyone still harboured the illusion that India is a ‘traditional’ society, this removed it. A 55-year-old senior colleague, over a hot cup of tea, asked me in hushed tones, what breadcrumbing meant. Hinge to him, was still a furniture feature. Daddy just meant father. Generation gap is no longer a mere gap but a wide divide. 

That the digital natives could assemble fast and mobilise resources has been in ample demonstration especially during the flood/landslide situation in Kerala or in Tamil Nadu where they worked alongside the establishment in relief work. In India, this was perhaps the first such agglomeration of this generation on a protest movement. The lessons and the inferences from the experience will shape cultural space and political engagement in the country in future. It will be worthwhile also to examine how we can realign our classroom delivery and re-engineer work spaces for them. Will a 9-5 model still work? They have finally been seen and heard, understood to a large extent, and appreciated much. The perception switch, like the sweet ending of a typical Bollywood movie, proved to be a tear-jerker in more ways than one.