Manish Sain

Journalist and crocheter

[Manish Sain @manish__sain]

RT @free_thinker: I feel one that that is different in GenZ from the older generations is that they don't care for obedience. I saw so many…

[Catty @CatWomaniya]

The millennial in me finally seeing one resignation in 12 years, thanks to GenZ.

[ranjona banerji 🇮🇳 @ranjona]

More power to the students! 💪
One Pradhan gone...

[Manish Sain @manish__sain]

Never thought I'd say this but it appears Gen Z irreverence is going to deliver us from this hellscape after all.

[Rofl Gandhi 2.0 🏹 Commentary @RoflGandhi_]

गया धर्मेंद्र, अब नरेंद्र!

[Press Trust of India @PTI_News]

Pradhan's resignation is proof that if you don't get scared, you can win: CJP's Dipke

[Jarshad NK @jarshadnk]

Sachin Tendulkar has finally spoken on the student protests, and I had to read his note twice: once as a fan and once as an editor. The fan was disappointed, but the editor realised that this was a textbook specimen of the kind of writing that George Orwell warned about in his essay “Politics and the English Language”.

The essay was written in 1946, but it might well have been written yesterday about this very statement. Orwell’s point was that when people want to hide something, they stop using plain words and reach instead for the passive voice, for fog, for phrases that sound like they mean something while meaning nothing at all.

Consider the line, where students are disappointed that “their hard work hasn’t been rewarded”. Rewarded by whom, and denied by whom? There was a paper leak, which means somebody leaked it, some institution failed to prevent it, and an official presides over that institution. Yet none of them appears in the statement, and neither does the leak itself. A crime with identifiable custodians has been turned into something that simply happened to lakhs of children through nobody's fault.

Then comes the list of those who must set things right: parents, teachers, friends, relatives, schools and administrators. If you read that list again slowly, you will notice it covers everyone in India except the people the students are actually protesting against, which is to say the NTA, the education ministry and the government. When everyone is responsible, nobody is, and that is not an accident of drafting. It was engineered to deflect blame.

There is also a quiet sentence buried in the middle. “A society which prioritises outcomes over effort will seek shortcuts over meritocracy” is a line about those who take shortcuts, meaning the cheat. So a note on protests around paper leaks ends up gently lecturing the leaked-upon about honesty. His father’s lovely lesson—that failure is okay but cheating is not—is again aimed squarely at individuals, while the scandal and protests right now are about institutions that failed them.

The rest of the statement is what Orwell called ready-made strips of words, glued together. Full of dreams and energy, fuel to our success, safeguard their aspirations. Nobody can disagree with any of it, which is precisely the point, for this is prose engineered so that no one in power will find a single sentence to object to.

What an actual position would have looked like is a single sentence in the active voice: The government must find and punish those who leaked the paper, and fix the system that allowed it. He wrote 160+ words to avoid writing that one.

Here’s Orwell’s full essay for those interested:
https://t.co/VlPoJdOcDG

[Ajay Kamath @ajay43]

The mist refreshing part about this Gen Z protest is the utter irreverence they display towards politicians. After decades of deification, this is what was sorely needed.

[Anish Gawande @anishgawande]

30,000+ people are on the streets of Delhi now. People are protesting in 100+ cities across India. Despite threats and intimidation, thousands more are streaming in.

The government must realise the scale of public anger. How important is Dharmendra Pradhan? Why can't he resign?

[Nilanjana Roy 📚🦊 @nilanjanaroy]

A big generational shift: the PM was feared, rarely criticised by name.

Now he's a meme. This generation calls him out directly, mocks him and memes him without fear, sees him as yet another disappointing RWA Uncle who doesn't get them — and many of them are from core BJP voter families.

[dil @silveroystr]

when the idiot by fyodor dostoyevsky casually cured my perfectionism

[Rajkamal Prakashan 📚 @RajkamalBooks]

बीच का रास्ता नहीं होता • पाश

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

#Congress will have to answer 120 crore people of India about its inhuman act of brutality on innocent protestors http://bit.ly/knpjSJ

[lalomanca @kyabatauvro]

We are blessed to have these insta editors man, this is INSANELY GOOD

[Mohak Mangal @mohakmangal]

In 1997, this man was the ABVP National Secretary and was just about to join the Bharatiya Janata Party. There was a paper leak in Odisha and there was a major protest. This man participated in them. He was beaten by the police.

"We staged a protest against the Odisha government, in front of the secretariat. Around 1,500 students joined us there. While the protest was peaceful, the police charged against the activists. He was badly beaten up at that time. He had a few fractures too."

Who is he? Mr Dharmendra Pradhan. Imagine that Dharmendra Pradhan was protesting against paper leaks in 1997 and was beaten!

There is an amazing Indian Express article about him. Linked below. The irony? One of the interviewees says:

"under Pradhan's regime, the students will have more scope for dissent. "It is natural for students to be anti-establishment."

[gulvinder @rebelliousdogra]

Gaand faad edit 🔥🔥

[Rajkamal Prakashan 📚 @RajkamalBooks]

कहत कबीर • हरिशंकर परसाई

[Abhishek @vicharabhio]

I think I downloaded the wrong "The Odyssey".