At a protest about a leaked medical exam, I watched a man scream himself hoarse about Virat Kohli living in London.
And weirdly, that one guy explained the whole thing to me.
Because he wasn’t even the odd one out. Scroll the protest reels and it’s a full of such stuff. The leak, fine. But also corruption. Also religion. Also unemployment. Also “this government hates us.” One leaked question paper, and suddenly we’re relitigating the entire Republic of India.
I used to think these people were just dumb. They’re not. It’s something way older, and honestly way more fun to pull apart. Last post I blamed your phone. Today let’s climb into the crowd itself. Mind the stones :)
The Anger Was Already There
Small secret. Everyone is a little bit furious all the time.
Not screaming-furious. Just that low background buzz of “this system is rigged and I’m getting played.” You feel it in the RTO queue. In the rent. In watching some rich kid glide into a seat you bled three years for. You swallow it. You go home. You eat dinner. Repeat for thirty years.
Smart people have a fat term for this. Relative deprivation. Basically, people don’t lose it because they’re suffering. They lose it because of the gap. What you were promised minus what you actually got. That gap is where the rage sleeps.
And a leaked exam is the perfect matchstick. Because it’s not a vibe. It’s proof. Stamped, written, undeniable proof that yes, the game is fixed, yes you can grind for three years and still lose to a guy who got the answer key as a WhatsApp forward. It confirms the exact thing everybody was already quietly boiling about.
So the protest was never really about 720 marks. The exam just handed a shape to a rage that was already sitting there. Loaded. Waiting for a reason.
So Why Kohli? Why Religion? Why Everything?
Because a protest doesn’t create angry people. It collects them.
Picture a pressure-cooker convention. Everyone shows up already whistling about something slightly different. Put a thousand of them on one street and the whistles don’t stay separate. They fuse into one giant “EVERYTHING IS BROKEN” scream. My exam anger plus your job anger plus his petrol-price anger becomes the same anger. The specific complaint just… dissolves.
And the movement secretly loves this. “Fix this one exam” is a tiny tent. “The whole system is rotten” is a giant tent. Bigger tent, more people, more noise. So the cause quietly stretches itself to fit every frustration in a 5km radius.
The sad part? The one thing that was actually fixable, the exam, gets buried under a hundred things that aren’t. You walked in with a sharp, winnable demand. You walk out demanding world peace and Kohli’s return flight. Nobody can hand you that.
The Crowd Does Your Bravery For You
Now the awkward bit. The stone-throwing.
That guy lobbing a rock at a police van? Alone, he’s a soft, polite fellow who says sorry when he bumps into furniture. Drop him into a crowd of 5,000 and suddenly he’s got the courage of ten men and the aim of a toddler.
There’s a name for this too. Deindividuation. Long word, simple idea. In a big enough crowd you stop being you. You become “the crowd.” Nobody’s watching you specifically, the guilt gets split 5,000 ways, and things you’d never dream of doing alone suddenly feel not just fine but heroic. The crowd loans you a courage that was never yours. Liquid confidence, minus the liquid.
But, and I have to be fair here, a crowd is NOT automatically a brainless mob. That’s a lazy take. Most people at that protest went home without touching a single stone, probably just cranky they missed lunch.
And here’s the line nobody wants to hear. That same switch flips for the guys in uniform. A constable, packed inside a wall of police, adrenaline maxed, orders flying everywhere, is under the exact same “we are one angry blob” spell. The mob brain does not check your job ID. If it explains the stone-thrower, it explains the over-swinging cop. Fair is fair.
Okay. The Lathi. Deep Breath.
The eternal WhatsApp war. “Police attacked innocent students!” versus “What were the cops supposed to do, offer them chai and a foot massage?”
The Constitution does give you the right to protest. Article 19. Gather, shout, march, all yours. But the exact words are sneaky. You get to assemble “peaceably, and without arms.” Peaceably. Without arms. That right there is the whole game.
Stay peaceful and the cop leaning in is on thin ice. But the second a crowd turns violent, or shoves past barricades toward Parliament, or starts flinging stones, the law flips. It legally becomes an “unlawful assembly,” and now the police can order it to break up and, if it won’t, use force to make it. That’s not a fascist bonus round. It’s literally the rulebook. “Just let them charge Parliament” was never an option.
So yeah, “what else could the cops do” is a real point.
BUT. Big but. The power to hit is not a licence to enjoy it. The law screams one word. Proportion. Minimum force. And stop the moment the crowd backs off. We even have a legendary Supreme Court case for this. In 2012, cops lathi-charged a sleeping crowd at Ramlila Maidan, at midnight. The court did not vibe with it. Called it excessive, flat out.
So the real question is never “did they use force, yes or no.” It’s “did the force match the threat, and did it stop when the threat did.” Whacking a crowd breaking barricades and pelting stones, defensible. Whacking kids who are peaceful, or already running away, that’s the Ramlila line, and it’s just wrong. Both “every lathi is Hitler” and “police can do whatever they want” are, legally, nonsense.
And Finally: “MINISTER MUST RESIGN”
The chant. On loop. Forever.
This one genuinely splits me in half, so stick with me.
One half pushes back hard. A minister runs a machine with lakhs of employees. Some random clerk three floors down sells a paper, and that’s the minister’s personal crime? Because if we say yes, if the top guy must fall every single time anything breaks anywhere below him, congrats, we’ve built a country where one hunger strike can topple anyone. That’s not accountability, that’s a hostage situation. And let’s be honest, half the “resign!” energy is just our oldest national sport in fancy dress. The deep desi craving to watch the big man fall. Feels like justice. Usually it’s just entertainment with a cause attached.
But then the other half fires back. Because accountability was never about the first leak. It’s about what you did after. And this is where our man’s defence quietly collapses. This is the guy who built his entire brand on stopping paper leaks. A committee was formed. Reforms “implemented.” And then it leaked again. So it’s not “an employee messed up.” It’s “the system you personally swore to fix broke twice on your watch.” You don’t get to pocket the credit for the reform and then act shocked at the wreckage.
Actually, Wait. The Sneaky Smart Bit.
And then a third thought hit me, and it flipped how I see the whole chant.
Every protest ends the same way. Not with a bang. With a negotiation. Everyone yells for a week, then quietly sits at a table and haggles.
Now play it out. Imagine the ONLY demand was “fix the system.” The government smiles, says “absolutely, we’ll form a committee,” and… that’s it. You got a press release. Nothing changed. A vague demand is the easiest thing in the world to nod at and bury.
But now add a big, loud, scary demand on top. “The minister must RESIGN.” Suddenly the government has something it desperately wants to refuse. So it digs its heels in on saving the minister, and to look like it “won” that fight, it throws you the boring, unglamorous stuff you actually needed. The re-test. The compensation. The real reforms. The resignation was never really the prize. It was the price tag you slap on so the government haggles you down to exactly what you wanted anyway.
Ask for the moon so you get the mountain. Old trick. Works.
So here’s where I finally land. I don't mind the resignation but, Resignation as an accountability for a promised-and-failed fix? Sure, present the bill. Resignation to stop the angst while the exam stays exactly as broken? Waste of everyone’s time. But resignation as a loud bargaining chip that quietly forces the real fixes through the back door? Okay. Now I get it. Now it’s not dumb at all. It’s almost clever.
(bear with me, I'm about to get briefly poetic and then never again.)
Bob Dylan sang that the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. Sixty years on, ours still is. How many leaks before someone fixes the actual machine instead of just firing whoever’s standing next to it? Nobody knows. The answer’s still out there, blowing around somewhere, refusing to land.
Coming Up Next
Because that’s the real scam, isn’t it. Everyone wants a villain. Nobody wants to fix the plumbing.
So next post I go full nerd. Why this exam keeps breaking, who’s quietly getting rich off it staying broken, and my favourite bit, whether we can design a fairer way to survive a leak with some math. I even built a little calculator you can poke at. Bring your brain. It’s the fun one, promise.
Rant over. So where do YOU land? Is “make the minister resign” real accountability, or just us enjoying the downfall? I flip-flop on this literally every day.
P.S. Virat can live on the Moon if he likes. Just leave him out of the exam war, please.
Not made up, in case you want to check: “assemble peaceably and without arms” is Article 19(1)(b); once a protest turns violent it can be declared an unlawful assembly and police can use force to break it up (Section 129 CrPC, now BNSS 148), but it has to be proportionate. The 2012 Ramlila Maidan case is where the Supreme Court called a midnight lathi-charge on a sleeping crowd excessive. Relative deprivation and deindividuation are real social-psychology ideas, and so is the finding that crowds aren’t just mindless mobs. The Dylan line is “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963). The flip-flopping is all mine.
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