1984: More Relevant Than Ever

 

There are many books which we may like to read, but somehow fall through the cracks of our 'sick hurry and divided aims' (my apology to Matthew Arnold). For me George Orwell's 1984 was one such book. Though I have read his Animal Farm and a couple of his short stories, but this dystopian classic has languished in my reading list for long. Recently I decided that it was high time I laid my hands on it.

Since we are in the middle of a pandemic, I decided not to take a chance of visiting my favourite second-hand bookshops, but order them online. In a way I feel picking up 1984 at this juncture was pertinent - as some of the worst prophecies in the book are coming true only now. Big data surveillance is the new buzzword for both governments and technology giants and our lives are getting mapped, overtly and covertly, by them.

The first chapter of 1984 sets the stage for the futuristic world where surveillance is all pervasive. The 'big brother' watches you through a telescreen which can be dimmed but not shut off. Written in 1949, Orwell had foreseen how television will become a major propaganda tool.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a citizen of Oceania which is ruled with an iron fist by one Big Brother of Ingsoc (English Socialism) party, who off an on keeps appearing on the telescreen. Then there is Emmanuel Goldstein the erstwhile comrade of Big Brother, but now branded as enemy of the people.

Smith works for a department known as office of truth, but is torn between his fear for Big Brother and a sneaking admiration for Goldstein. He writes a diary knowing fully well the perils of such an exercise. He risks being charged with thoughtcrime - harbouring unorthodox thoughts, such as unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc.

At times he also wonders about the pointlessness of writing a diary. If caught by the thought police, he would not just face death but total annihilation - the diary will be reduced to ashes and he will be 'vaporized' from the records. For rest of the citizenry such a person never existed.

Oceania is constantly at war with one country or another and its friends and foes keep changing like musical chairs. Smith's department is constantly updating the records as the party wants its citizens to forget and remove from their consciousness that today's friend was actually a foe a couple of years ago and vice versa.

The party believes who controls the past, controls the future and who controls the present, controls the past. With constantly shifting enemies it is forever on a 'manufacturing consent' mode.

Another major project in progress is the compilation of a dictionary in Newspeak - the language of Oceania, as opposed to Oldspeak. The aim is to reduce the number of words by weeding out synonyms and thereby narrow down the range of consciousness of the people. Winston's colleague and philologist Syme believes it will bring down thoughtcrime as there will be no words to express it!

When 1984 was published the reviewers were quick to interpret it as a critique of Communist societies that had sprouted in Europe after World War II, backed by Soviet Union. The overarching presence of the party machinery and the curtailment of liberties for common citizens led to this conclusion.

However, in the current post-Soviet era it is becoming clear that even democratically elected leaders are no less ambitious about exercising greater control over citizens. This trend has been on the rise since the tragic 9/11 attacks and quite often these overreaches are couched in reasons such as safety and security to make it more acceptable to the people.

But what is more closer to the Orwellian nightmare is the rise of tech companies, especially in the social media space such as Facebook, Twitter and Google and the repository of information they maintain about their users. And sadly, unlike governments, they cannot be voted out.

Yet another unsettling byproduct is the dark web - an amoral underbelly attracting amateur and professionals out to make a fast buck by conning users, stealing data and carry out malware attacks. No amount of safety infrastructure is proving enough of a deterrent to firewall data from these criminals.

Captive Audience Conundrum

Karl Marx once described religion as the opium of the masses. Now the 24/7 TV news channels have taken over that mantle from the guardians of faith.

From their prime time pulpits, television anchors dole out daily diversionary fix and firewall the masses from real issues, as the former brings in more eyeballs and the latter only means more leg work, sometimes loss of ad revenue or even tax raids. In their missionary zeal to pursue the holy grail of Television Rating Point (TRP), the anchors have donned the mantle of entertainers.

You may be in the middle of a spiralling coronavirus caseload, closure of businesses, rampant job losses and the Chinese may be breathing down our necks in Ladakh, but when you switch on the television you will see none of it. Instead of holding a mirror to society, our smug anchors are indulging in the exercise of smoke and mirrors.

Gone are the days of news anchors being mere messengers; they are now competing with TV serial actors with regard to histrionics. The melodrama levels these anchors whip up during their prime time shows would make late Manmohan Desai proud. They become the judge, jury and the executioners and their primetime shows are war minus shooting. Some even costume up for the act - we had a Hindi TV news channel anchor dress up as an astronaut when our moon lander mission was about to touch down. Tragically the mission ended in failure, had it succeeded we would have probably seen many more anchors in space suits the next day.

To keep news dramatic and entertaining a villain is vital. Some invite Pakistani guests and make them the whipping boys. At other times villains are spun out after giving the narrative a Goebbelsian twist - months ago it was Tablighi Jamaat, yesterday it was Rhea Chakraborty and now it is Deepika Padukone. Stoking hatred is rewarding, but when laced with glam quotient it makes TRP scale new highs (no pun intended).

For the 42-inch LED owning middle class it is a good diversion from their dreary lives of eat, work, buy groceries and whine about price rise and taxes. It further reinforces their pet beliefs - those in the movies are of loose morals, people from the 'other' community can never be trusted and the like. And instills a sense of holier-than-thou self-righteousness.

Earlier in the 1980s, when the government was busy bringing every district into its television network, the viewers were described as 'captive' audience because the state-owned Doordarshan enjoyed a monopoly over the airwaves. What passed off as a 20-minute news bulletin at 9 pm was actually a caravan of speeches, book releases, and planting of trees (all mainly in Delhi) by our telegenic prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Things like 'breaking news' or 'flash' were unheard of and there was a yawning gap between what we saw on television and what we read in newspapers and magazines. Anchors of that era Preet K.S. Bedi, Minu, Komal G.B. Singh, Gitanjali Aiyar, Rene Simon became household names, but more for their English pronunciation and sartorial sense. Women gawked at the sarees some of the women anchors wore, while many viewers wondered how Preet could always manage to find a turban matching the colour of his suit or tie.

The entry of satellite television in the late 1980s began stirring things up. It provided a glimpse of how BBC or CNN television news looked like. The launch of homegrown news channels like Star TV news and vernacular offerings in the mid-nineties raised the bar. We later had the first televised battle - Kargil war enter our drawing rooms and the subsequent Kandahar hijacking.

Those days were heady with TV reporters doing a lot of ground reporting. But around 2010 the news channel business began consolidating with the entry of some industrial houses and conglomerates. The managements tightened the purse strings and ground reporting became one of the casualties. It gave way to a more cost-effective prime time discussions moderated by an anchor with guests of various political persuasions.

After 2014, the television news underwent a sea change. Television anchors who pulled no punches while questioning those in power suddenly became very reverential. On the other hand they trained their guns on the opposition - whataboutery, false equivalence and jingoism became the new stock-in-trade. TV anchors have ceased being watch dogs for people's rights, but alternate playing lapdogs and guard dogs for the establishment.

Soon all panel discussions began looking the same. During the Doordarshan monopoly days the people had lamented that news bulletins were glorified government handouts and enviously marvelled at Western countries with hundreds of channels. But now despite a surfeit of news channels, diversity is hard to come by and we continue to remain a captive audience.

A Newspaper's Cri de Coeur

I was a part of the daily routine of most households and people used to read me along with the morning tea. I had an air of solemnity as I was holding mirror to the society and highlighting some of its warts. I could make or break reputations or even bring down the governments. A late editor of a leading English daily had once bragged he was holding the second-most important job in the country.

At school, teachers would advise students to read newspapers to improve vocabulary and general knowledge. And diligent civil service aspirants used to pore over my editorials, with dictionary close at hand, to help them with unfamiliar words. In pre-television days I was the ultimate window to the world.

However, right now I am facing an existential crisis and pundits have been writing my obituaries for a while. The combined onslaught of television, internet and WhatsApp forwards have been taking a heavy toll on me.

In the pre-internet days when television was the only threat to newspapers, some enterprising publishers tried to remodel me as primarily an advertising and marketing platform and dumb down on social issues. A famous press baron once even said that news is mere space filler among the advertisements, or words to that effect.

So broadsheets became tabloidized and all pages reeked of a Page 3 feel as newspapers stooped to conquer the yuppy eyeballs by providing them a feel good experience. Those working in the newsrooms started getting reprimanded by their higher-ups - please don't carry such 'downmarket' photos, our newspaper has an upmarket readership.

The coming of the internet further eroded my advertisement catchment pool. Thanks to some online classified listing platforms such as Olx and Craigslist, our clientele for classified ads disappeared. For the customers it no longer made sense to go to a newspaper office to submit an ad, pay per word and then wait for days to see it published - when all this could now be done at the click of a mouse and often at free of cost.

Remember those pages and pages of matrimonial ads on Sundays: Highly educated US-settled Iyengar Brahmin engineer looking for a 'fair' bride of the same caste, or a fair, well-educated, cultured Goud Saraswat Brahmin girl looking for an alliance; intespersed with words like 'decent' marriage (a sly hint that dowry will be offered) or 'simple' marriage (no dowry). To digress a little these columns gave a glimpse of myriad castes and other imponderables such as gotra and manglik that come into play while fixing marriages in India.

These ads too started porting off to those dime a dozen matrimonial sites such as Jeevan Saathi, Bharat Matrimony and some to more granular caste-specific sites like Nair Matrimony or even those catering to divorcees like SecondShaadi.com.

Amid all this disquiet on the advertisment front, subscriptions were also on a free fall despite dirt cheap rates. The predatory pricing by some leading players ensured that newspapers remained even cheaper than the daily chai-sutta expense of its readers.

Even in the households where I had entry, it was a coffee-table-to-attic existence, with every family member regarding me as part of the furniture. I was considered way too 'low-tech' and taxing to read because of the falling attention spans of people and the younger generation in particular. There is now even talk of a 'post-text society' dominated by videos and memes.

Those travelling by trains or buses used to carry me to kill time, but now they have their smartphones to stream them music videos and movies. Anyone without a headphone during travel is now considered a Philistine.

While this death in slow motion has been going on for years, Covid-19 pandemic has appeared like one of those masked movie villains who surreptitiously enter the ICUs in the dead of night to pull the ventilator plugs.

My entry suddenly got forbidden to apartments and households. The resident welfare association unclejis saw me as a disease carrier. For many I was a good riddance, as they were happy in their post-truth bubbles - with the daily fix of dubious WhatsApp forwards, plus 9 pm prime time debates aired by North Korean channels.

Newspaper circulations started getting reduced to a fraction of what they were in the pre-Covid era. The smaller ones started shutting down while the larger ones started cutting down on pages, print runs and ultimately jobs. Losing a job during lockouts is the unkindest cut, but for many journalists and other newspaper employees it is the new normal.

In the post-Covid world the newspaper industry will be reduced to its skeletal form and probably the worst hit will be ground reporting with journalistic checks and balances. This will only mean ceding the ground to fake and unverified news, which has already overrun most social media platforms.

The television channels gave up ground reporting long ago and settled for a less expensive model of prime time anchor and panelists engaged in a debate, which at best is a staged circus with very little journalism and loads of propaganda thrown in. Certainly not a good model to follow and not at all conducive to democracy.

Only a handful of publications, mostly online, may keep the flag of journalism, as we knew it, aloft. But for how long is a big question.


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Future Shock, Courtesy Covid-19

While the current coronavirus pandemic may have rekindled interest in dystopian movies related to virus outbreaks such as Pandemic and Contagion, thanks to Netflix and Amazon Prime, the society seems to be moving towards what Alvin Toffler had envisaged in his books Future Shock and Third Wave.

During my college days in the late 1980s I used to see these two books in every other book shop and with pavement sellers, but somehow futurism and science fiction were not my cup of tea, so I stayed away. From the random reading of reviews, I got to know that the books apparently talk of an information society and the rapid changes that will happen in the 'super-industrial' society, where technologies getting outdated in a short span of time will be a routine affair.

Toffler's famous quote - “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn,” began figuring in the 'Thought for today' sections of newspaper and magazines. Third Wave talks of the concept of telecommute and home becoming an office space, thanks to computer science.

Back then growing up in a tier-2 city all this sounded too much of a futuristic mumbo jumbo. The offices were still marching to the clickety-clack of the typewriters and employees had to sit neck-deep in a sea of paper and files. Electronic typewriters were seen with the same awe as present day i-Phone launches.

Talking of phones, they were of wired variety with an unwieldy dialler and a handset that used to rest on it. Its penetration was also minimal and getting a phone connection used to be like winning a lottery. Many used to mark PP along with their phone numbers, which meant Private Party or the nearest contact number, but not self-owned. The chances of getting that person on the line largely depended on the mood of the phone's owner.

Computers were seen only in science magazines and Hollywood films. Computer institutes like NIIT were in their early days of extending their footprint across the country. Those in the middle or fag end of their careers saw computers as an evil that will gobble up jobs.

Later the mobile phone-internet duo brought about tectonic shifts in how we work, communicate and every other facet of our lives. Toffler's prophecy looked plausible but it remained more of an exception than a rule. Only those doing freelance gigs worked from home on a permanent basis, but for others it was most often a consolation prize provided by the manager after rejecting the leave. Many bosses looked at work from home with suspicion and companies even had a monthly cap on it.

Covid-19 and the world's biggest lockdown in India changed it all. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but cruel necessity leaves you with a Hobson's choice. Everybody had to willy-nilly work from home. Managers who had so far looked down upon this practice as the first refuge of slackers were forced to list out its virtues. Even industries such as banks, insurance, newspaper publishing, who had never experimented with this practice, were forced into a sink or swim situation - often with mixed results.

Webinars, Zoom meetings, Slack messenger were the new trappings as the work shifted from office to 1 and 2 BHKs of employees, with dining or study table doubling up as home office.

 The early days were heady - no office commute, no need to worry about what to wear for office or whether it has been washed and ironed, shaving became optional, no last minute panic stricken checking of office bag before leaving home for mobile phone and laptop chargers, access cards, pedestal keys and spectacles.

Then the warts started becoming visible - back and neck pains started popping up as the home chairs were no substitute for ergonomically superior office chairs. Many had to make do with pain balms and pain killers as the lockdown ensured that no furniture shops were open, thereby ruling out the possibility of a better chair.


Clearing small doubts and quick questions that just needed a shout out to the colleague at the next pod, now requires laborious scribbling of messages and waiting for a response, which quite often comes with a time lag.

The country's perennial problem of erratic power supply rears its head time and again and sometimes the outages are so long drawn that even the power back-up gives up. 

Another bugbear is the patchy internet. With almost everyone working from home and students taking online classes, internet speed often winds down to a crawl. One needs to be mindful that the number of tabs open do not exceed 10. Otherwise the system hangs at crucial moments like when you are about to click the 'send' button of an important email or during those important calls.

Earlier, leaving for office and the commute back to home, however harrowing, marked a kind of dividing line between work and home. But now that line has blurred. One has to be mindful of the number of pressure cooker whistles while attend a Zoom call and those unwelcome tinkling of door bell while making an online presentation.

Now Google wants its employees to work from home for rest of the year and Twitter wants them to work from home forever! So it looks like this accidental global experiment, forced upon us by an invisible virus, and its serendipitous findings are here to stay. And it is too enticing a template for companies to cut office overhead costs.

In short, we are trying to build up a generation of employees who will see their colleagues through Zoom video, who will never see the insides of an office - the cafeteria banter, the office politics and the corner office intrigue, the raucous bullies, office romance and the associated gossip, visits to nearby shacks for chai-sutta... the list goes on. A really scary prospect!

However, all the waxing eloquent about the virtues of work from home cannot hide the fact that it is at best a privilege that only a section of white collar employees can enjoy. There is a vast segment out there where this mode won't be feasible - those employed in hospitals, police stations, fire stations, factories, transport, hotels, airlines, power plants, oil refineries, farms and many other sectors. They have no choice but to step out of their houses and contend with the risk of contracting the dreaded virus.

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Bollywood Bereaved

Bollywood, which was already facing widespread disruption in film making and distribution due to the lockdown, has now been hit by a double whammy of another kind - deaths of Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor.

Both had diametrically opposite career trajectories. Khan was a rank outsider, while Kapoor was born into Bollywood's first family. For Kapoor, the entry into the tinsel town was a stroll in the park, but for Khan, it began with a hard landing.

Kapoor gained instant stardom with his debut film Bobby, but Khan had to move heaven and earth to be recognized. His was a gritty tale of an aspiring actor saddled with bit roles, who finally emerges out of the shadows through his talent and commitment.

Though I had seen Salaam Bombay way back in the late eighties, I only recently discovered that Khan was there in that film. Back then the only recognizable face in that Mira Nair's in-your-face peek into the Mumbai's red-light area was Anita Kanwar. She had become a well-known face because of her role in TV soap opera Buniyaad. Doordarshan was ruling the tube and satellite television was still a few more years away.

For Khan, the nineties was almost a washout - the mainstream cinema was under the stranglehold of David Dhawan-Govinda horseplay with double entendre ditties and wafer-thin plots. And people were more than willing to suspend their disbelief to cheer Govinda's gyrations. It even forced many established names to dumb down and fall in line.

On the other hand, offbeat film circuit was lorded over by Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, who had by then carved out a niche audience after a long struggle.

Khan remained confined to the small screen and sundry TV serials. It was only in post-2000 he began finding his place under the sun. The tearing down of single-screen cinema theatres to multiplexes also worked in his favour.

He made a splash in the international film circuit by appearing in Life of Pi, Namesake and later Slumdog Millionaire. In the mainstream cinema, he made an impression by figuring in Life In a Metro, opposite Konkana Sen Sharma. His small-town naivete endeared him to the masses. Another film that won the critical, as well as mass acclaim, was Maqbool and Haider.

Soon the mainstream directors found him bankable as the multiplex cine-goers warmed up to the versatility of his acting prowess. Whether it was a light comedy, a crime thriller or tragedy, Khan assayed those roles in many shades with ease that soon became his trademark.

Movies like Hindi Medium, Qarib Qarib Single and others followed. However, the most talked-about film on social media turns out to be Lunchbox. Though I didn't like the ending, Khan, along with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Nimrat Kaur successfully present a slice of Mumbai's suburban middle-class life.

The news of his ailment began doing rounds from last year, though the details were a closely guarded secret. His mother's death a few days ago made news for the fact that he was not able to go to Jaipur due to the travel restriction caused by the lockdown. Khan's end surprised many, and it came quite early - he definitely had much more of cinema left in him.

Rishi Kapoor

He was the youngest member of Bollywood's first family, and the first film Bobby was a dream launch. Soon he emerged as the archetypal lover boy with cherubic looks and happy-go-lucky demeanor. He was the original disco dancer of Bollywood and soon became the favourite pin-up boy in women's hostel rooms.

To his credit Kapoor stuck to his lover boy roles even when the anti-establishment angry young man hero, popularized by Amitabh Bachchan, was a rage. He continued to churn out reasonable returns to the box office through his movies like Sargam, Khel Khel Mein and later Chandini.

However, it was in the fag end of his career Kapoor got roles in which he could stand out. Whether it was playing a nonagenarian in Kapoor & Sons or the patriarch of a Muslim family branded as terrorists in Mulk, Kapoor assayed those roles with dexterity that was not on display during the early part of his career.

But my all-time favourite happens to be Do Dooni Chaar where he plays a harried Maths teacher who aspires to buy a car from his meagre savings. His wife, played by real life spouse Neetu Singh, provides an able supporting cast.

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Coronavirus Inc: India Project Report

INTRODUCTION: As part of our long-term program to increase our footprint across the world, India presents a good green field opportunity. Globally we have gained some early success with the World Health Organization declaring us a pandemic, the second in this century since SARS.

But we wish to emphasize that compared with SARS our growth trajectory has been steeper - in less than six months we have scaled up our presence in over 180 countries and nearly covered one million people and continue to 'go viral' at a scorching speed. We also had some other notable successes: 

• Met all the timelines in the country of our origin - China, and we are on course to soon complete the  project life cycle of our largest market. 
• Established new hot spots - Italy, Spain and the United States, and that too in a challenging environment of robust healthcare system, advanced medical research, economic prowess and educated populace. They could be our new growth engines once China runs its course.

Anecdotally speaking, the fear psychosis we have generated globally has turned a major chunk of the world's population into insecure hypochondriacs and obsessive compulsive disorder freaks - hallucinating about viruses on door handles, lift and ATM keys, staircase railing and window grills.

OBJECTIVE: We intend to turn India into our new growth engine as its population is next only to China. Our long-term goal is to replicate or even improve upon the successes of dengue and H1N1, which have become permanent fixtures in the country.

OPPORTUNITIES: In terms of population density, India offers an even better opportunity than China. It has over 400 people per square kilometre as against China's 150 odd people. In fact, in some urban clusters it is as high as 100,000 per square kilometre. All this makes social distancing an impossible prospect - which we can use to our advantage. In many European and southeast Asian countries we were finding social distancing a major growth hurdle.

Another favourable factor is that a major chunk of the population lacks access to running water. Hence the compliance towards regular hand wash will be poor. We just need to stay put at door handles or ATM keys.

However, the biggest window of opportunity India offers is its healthcare system - which ranges from being patchy to non-existent. Sample these facts: The country has only 0.55 beds per 1,000 population; 100,000 ICU beds for its over a billion people and around 50,000 ventilators, while the requirement could be around one million. Even doctors and nurses dealing with Covid-19 cases have to make do without proper personal protective equipment.

Barring few pockets, the country is banking more on cow urine and other bogus remedies. And many are indulging in diversions like clapping hands and lighting lamps standing on balconies and giving us a communal identity. Some are even living under the smug belief that because they are vegetarians they won't get infected. And the Chinese got it because they eat batty stuff. Having overrun countries with much better healthcare stats and more pro-active governments, India is a compelling low-hanging fruit that should not be missed.

CHALLENGES: The 21-day lockdown across the country may provide fillip to social distancing and flatten the growth curve. But its ad-hoc execution has left many cracks that can be exploited.

India happens to be the largest producer of malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and this had caused serious impediments during the execution of our China project.

Lastly, the world is racing towards developing a vaccine. Though it will take some time, but we cannot afford to be complacent. We need to set in motion our mutation plans so that we are not overwhelmed by vaccines.

 

 

Women On the Forefront

Well-known filmmaker Sudhir Mishra recently said he will be making again Yeh Woh Manzil To Nahin taking into account the current ferment among the student community in the country over the CAA-NRC agitation.

Yeh Woh Manzil... was a haunting film on student politics released in the 1980s. The movie is about three old men who come to attend a college's golden jubilee function after many decades. They had studied there in the pre-independence era and were involved in a botched bomb attack and double-crossed one of their comrades. They never revisited this town after completing their courses and went on to build their careers and were fairly successful.

All their lives they are haunted by the guilt of betrayal, and on the campus, it is further stoked by a series of incidents - when they come across the place where their friend was gunned down by the police; an old professor who immediately recognizes them and the incident, forcing them to beat a hasty retreat; and the female friend of the dead comrade who confronts them.

They come face to face with the current tussle between two groups of students - one led by an idealist student leader and the other by the son of a local industrialist, who leads a band of thugs. They decide to throw their weight behind the idealistic student leader in order to exorcise their guilt.

If Mishra were to make a film on today's student politics it will have a tectonic shift in terms of gender. In the 1980s film probably the only two female characters - one was the brief appearance of the woman friend of the dead comrade and a freelance journalist (played by Sushmita Mukherjee). In the new version Mishra will have to allot women prominent roles, if not the lead role itself.

Right from the early days of protest women have been on the forefront. Whether it is Jamia Milia Islamia University women students leading a march, protecting fellow male protesters from police brutality, handing out roses to the police, or the sit-in in Shaheen Bagh and lastly the surprise appearance of Deepika Padukone at a protest meet in Delhi, when her fellow 'A' list stars maintained a deafening silence, to list a few incidents.

They are taking up their roles with aplomb. Whether it is making fiery speeches or being the lead slogan shouters, holding witty posters, they are confidently defiant. This is something a Savitribai Phule or Ishwara Chandra Vidyasagar would have felt proud of.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi tried to give the current agitation a communal spin by saying the protestors can be identified with their clothes, but it evoked only funny cartoons and memes. 

The protestors came in all shapes and dresses - with or without headscarf, armed with Tricolour and Ambedkar portrait. Some with children in tow. They sounded confident while talking to TV cameras and minced no words while stating their views.

However, journalist Neha Dixit claims it is not an overnight phenomenon, nor a one-off case. She claims it has been building up from Nirbhaya protest days in 2012 and since then girl students have been hitting the streets for various protests, including pinjra tod and #Metoo movements. In many cases they have taken to streets in the face of family opposition. Hence there is nothing to feel surprised about.

While the mainstream media, especially servile TV channels, tried to ignore to protests or tried to paint the protesters in seditious and communal colours, it failed to stick. Many of these channels ran opinion polls on CAA hoping that bhakts and bots will bring in the numbers to show the protesters in negative light. But even they failed and many of these polls suffered a premature 'take-downs'.

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