Dear Protest,
Are you okay?
There was a time when this question was asked only to people. These days, it seems to be asked of the country.
I picked up the morning paper, and there you were. From the front page to the gossip columns, everyone had an opinion on you. A little later, I sipped my tea as I scrolled on Instagram. Same story. Every other post, every other reel, there you were again. That’s when I began to worry.
I tried the television next. Surely you’d be there somewhere too, buried beneath the shouting. One panel had already crowned you a patriot. Another had convicted you of treason. The verdict changed every few minutes. You never got to speak. I switched off the TV, folded the paper, and put my phone away.
I sank into the sofa, and before I knew it, I was thinking about the last time I saw you.
Do you remember?
I do.
I thought about Hyderabad first. Those impossible nights. A student writing of stardust in his final letter, and you refusing to leave his side. Then came Tamil Nadu’s farmers, who travelled to Delhi wearing the dead around their necks, hoping the country might finally look them in the eye. I remember spotting you at Bhima Koregaon too. Then you became a hashtag, because sometimes that’s the only way the world agrees to listen to women. And when the promise of home began to fade, you built another on the streets, held together by the Constitution, from Delhi to the freezing nights of Assam.
Just when they thought you had run out of breath, you rolled in on tractors from Punjab to Haryana, your tents rising with the dawn. Then you walked with the young of UP and Bihar, who had spent years chasing a uniform, only to be told that their dream would now last just four years. And while the wrestlers struggled, so did you. For the hardest bouts are seldom fought on the mat.
Then the world came to a standstill. The streets fell quiet. The cities forgot the very hands that had raised their skylines. And as those hands set out on never-ending journeys home, you refused to leave their side. One weary step after another, you trudged along.
You climbed mountains too, when rivers were told to make way for roads. You wandered through forests where every tree asked if it would be the next to fall. As bulldozers drowned out birdsong, you whispered hope in their ears.
They labelled you a distraction. They feared you as disruption. You kept showing up anyway.
And this time?
This time, you arrived out of nowhere. One hand held a book. The other, an admit card. There was a fee receipt in your pocket. A ‘result pending’ notification on your phone. A slipper somewhere in the crowd. And a back that shall remember every baton.
You know, sometimes I wish you’d just learn to fake it.
Put on a costume. Slip into disguise. Hear someone’s story, shrug, and move on.
But you never do that.
You don’t bear witness to people’s stories. You become them. Their pain becomes yours. Their hope, your hope. Their rage, your rage. One day you are a farmer. The next, a trans person. Then an Adivasi. Then a woman. You live in the dreams of the young and in the cries of rivers. Your face keeps changing, but your soul never does.
Perhaps that’s why power never seems to remember you. Out of office, you’re democracy’s proudest promise. In office, you’re its most inconvenient question.
You do this to us, you know. Whenever you are around, we get emotional.
And you know what we do when we get emotional?
We start naming things.
So when you ask questions, you’re called misguided.
When you refuse to leave, you’re called a parasite.
When more people join, you become a foreign conspiracy.
When the cameras turn up, you’re a traffic jam.
And when the world watches, you’re a toolkit.
The names keep changing.
The discomfort doesn’t.
Neither do you.
You return anyway. In little, ordinary things.
An admit card folded too many times.
A farmer’s turban.
A woman’s unbroken voice.
Shoes worn thin by impossible journeys.
An Adivasi song that refuses to be forgotten.
A forest that continues to say no.
A mountain stream that keeps finding its way.
You don’t wait for an invite.
You arrive the moment silence becomes too heavy to carry.
That’s why I wanted to write to you today.
Not just to ask how you’ve been.
We can all see that. And we’ll keep watching.
I just wanted to say,
Keep coming back.
Because every time you are silenced, you find a voice.
Every time you are buried, you become a tree.
So keep coming back. And until then, take care.
~ Waiting for what they call you next,
We, the people.
July 28, 2026
