To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

Abraham Lincoln

For a long time now, the go-to method of resistance among most people across the world has been through protests. Wikipedia’s page on “protest” lists numerous protests from the 1770s till 2019, along with different forms of protest. In recent times, the most relevant protests include the Hong Kong protests and the CAA protests across India.

Clearly, there is a vast difference of opinions between people who support and/or take part in protests and people who don’t take part and think it’s a waste of everyone’s time. While that is a debate for another day, what I want to focus on – especially in the light of recent events – is the involvement of the Indian youth in the protests across the country, not only for the CAA but even otherwise.

It is better to protest than to accept injustice.

Rosa Parks

Why do protests happen in the first place? They are basically a way to express disagreement or grievance at some action taken by some authority, and the hope is that if the authority notices enough people being dissatisfied with a certain action, they would revoke it. Examples from the Gandhian era have proved that protests do work. But, of late, protests have had a negative connotation associated with them.

The reasons that are generally given are:

1) Who’s right and who’s not: It is becoming increasingly difficult to understand who are the ones actually serious about fighting for a cause and equally difficult to find out what you are actually fighting for in the first place. With social media being so accessible to everyone and (fake) news spreading around so fast, suddenly everyone seems to have become an expert in current affairs, and within hours you have six different versions of a single event, often contradicting each other.

2) “What’s the point?”: Protesting is something you have to invest your time and effort in and it involves taking a lot of risks (from being subjected to violence to getting arrested) in order to achieve something, which, at the end of the day, might still not happen. This often leads to apathy among youth and elders. There’s this inherent notion that any protest will eventually die down and people will give up, so why bother joining one in the first place? The more likely reason is that people are inherently selfish: if an issue doesn’t affect them directly, they will not care. “I already have so many things to worry about” is the standard excuse.

Of course, there are several other reasons, but one underlying factor is that we (yes, myself included) are scared. Scared of being hit, scared of having a “criminal record”, scared to forgo our daily routine to stand in the sun outside someone’s house and hold up placards, scared of being expelled, scared that if you share an anti-government post on Facebook, you might be denied a US visa…

From my own experiences, I can say that if you are part of the Indian middle class, you are invariably part of the category that abhors protests. Exceptions do exist, but, in general, most adults will be ultra cautious to avoid any association with any protester (let alone be near any venue of a protest), and if you are a student, your parents would have told you to study and not poke your nose into anything else. We are always risk-averse, almost always looking for a “known and safe path” and rarely trying stuff out of the ordinary. Try telling your parents that you want to help your friends in a protest and you will very likely get a retort along the lines of: “He has nothing better to do, but you have XYZ to do” or “If he jumps into a well, will you follow him?”

Films like Ramanaa – I’m hoping – were meant to inspire students to stand up for their rights, but in reality, there seems to be a negative vibe associated with student protesters. As students, we are told that our duty is only “to study”; it is as though we are too young to raise our voices for anything (again, something that we’ve been “trained” to do since childhood). It is ironic how one set of Indians shift the onus on the youth to lead the nation in the future, and another set of Indians think student activism is taboo. I wonder how many folks think Greta Thunberg is wasting her time instead of going to high school.

Not all protests may be for good causes – because what constitutes a “good” cause varies from person to person – but I think the older generation should have a little more faith in today’s youth when they stand up for a cause. You should look at protesters as people who are courageous enough to defend what they believe in, rather than as jobless people wasting their time. Yes, when you are in the late teens and early twenties you should study, but that does not mean you cannot have other priorities. In the last four years, my college was shown in bad light several times because people were shocked that “students of such a prestigious college” were indulging in protests. Well, why can’t they protest? Don’t they have their own opinions and concerns? If you don’t want to be part of a rally or you think it’s insignificant, then you can choose to sit out, but it’s still plain wrong to diss students who are part of protests. If you want to focus on academics then you can do so, but it’s wrong to be apathetic towards serious issues, even if you are not going to be affected. Having a neutral stance is different because it shows that you have at least understood the pros and cons of the action involved.

Of course, another concern would be something like: what if the youths become violent? Well, it all depends on the need, right? If a peaceful protest gives the desired result, well and good. If not, then someone might have to (literally or figuratively) pull the trigger to initiate the next step of action. Again, whether this act is one of courage or violence is debatable (that’s why you needed people like Bhagat Singh in the freedom struggle).

People who are fighting or protesting for a good cause (which may be a subjective opinion) and more importantly, who know why they are doing so, should be encouraged any day – irrespective of whether they are a student or not. If a 16-year-old can inspire millions of humans to unite and fight against climate change, I think it’s time we broke the stereotype in this country. India is a democracy, and freedom of speech is a fundamental right. Even if the desired result is not achieved, it is still our duty to make our voices heard.

We’ve all been in Barney’s position, haven’t we? If not now, definitely so sometime in our past. Depending on whom you ask, you will either be told that it is okay to still search for that true passion, or you will be criticised for not being goal-oriented. Now, to contemplate and discuss how one would actually find his or her life’s purpose or goal is a topic for another day (or post). This article is more about my experience regarding the pressure people (myself included) face when it comes to taking up any new challenge or task, never mind the “ultimate” purpose. 

The ultimate victory in competition is derived from the inner satisfaction of knowing that you have done your best and that you have gotten the most out of what you had to give. 

Howard Cosell

We’re always told how competition is a good thing, how it brings out the best in us and pushes us further. What no one does tell us is what to gain from the competition. In the environment I am in, competition seems to lead to more losses than gains. The reason? People judge you by what you have done, not how you do something; people look at your “achievements”, not who you are as a person. Your entire life till this point has to be summarised in a single sheet of paper: your résumé. 

Be it for placements or internships, you are now characterised by a sheet of paper with some fancy formatting and even fancier words and numbers. This sheet will be scrutinised and inspected by multiple people and finally graded to indirectly say, “Your life has a score of 4/5.” Crazy as it may seem, this is what happens, pretty much everywhere. 

So what does this lead to? People now live a significant amount of their college lives and work lives with their major motivation being, “This will be a good resume point.” How many of them actually like what they are doing? These are the people who cook up a “mission statement” two days before their interview (which will last till the moment they walk out of the room). This is the same reason why LinkedIn profiles look like this: 

You project yourself as someone you are not because you are not proud of who you are. You are not happy with what you do. Then why do you still do it? Think of how many times you have coached yourself to repeat a statement that you don’t mean at all just because you know it is what someone wants to hear?

We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.

The narrator (“Fight Club”, 1999)

It is completely okay to try your hand at multiple things – some will click, some won’t. What is important is that you like what you do. We are so obsessed with what the end result of an activity will be that we don’t enjoy the journey. Think of an online course you took up – were you excited that you would learn something new or were you thinking about how you would include it in your resume once you complete the course? 

It is annoying when I tell people what I do for fun or what my hobbies are and they ask, “So have you thought of making money with it?” or “I don’t think you can include that in your resume, no?” That’s not the point! What’s wrong in doing something for myself – and I don’t mean just lazing around or binging TV shows – every now and then?

List out all the activities or talents you have – academic, music, sports, anything. Are you happy with those? Make a separate list of all the good qualities you think you possess or have been told so. Now think of all the times you have compared yourself to someone else seeing all the “cool” things they are doing. There’s an internal trigger which immediately goes, “That guy seems so productive. What am I even doing?” All your strengths suddenly seem trivial. Doesn’t that seem stupid? There are enough people in the world to put you down. Why do you want to do it yourself? 

It is okay not to be the best at everything you do. It is fine if your best friend has a job offer from Google but you don’t even know what the “I’m feeling lucky” button does. There’s a reason why behind every “I’m so happy for you!”, there is a little envy. We feel inferior simply because we don’t appreciate ourselves enough. Relative grading can happen in classes but lives cannot be compared that way. Just because your friend is interested in and is good at something that also happens to give good pay, but you are good at something else, does not mean that these should be compared and you should feel bad about yourself. 

No one likes to be called a “dabbler” or a “jack-of-all-trades”. Here’s what I think – it is okay to be one of those rather than being someone stuck doing something you don’t like. It is good to be decently skilled at multiple things and focus on a few of them based on the time and purpose.

When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

John Lennon

It is high time we stop gauging our lives based on others’ expectations and others’ achievements. Your life has innumerable intangible qualities that cannot be compared – good and bad. Value the good ones, admit and change the bad ones. Stop doing things so that the result can be seen on paper; do the things which make you feel good. I like to believe that the activities of the latter category will always bear fruit.