I am a Millennial Indian, and this past month has been difficult. Difficult to accept that a joke could become a political force. Suddenly, my social media feed was flooded with protest reels and shorts from Jantar Mantar, Delhi. I realised these were students, many of them not even eighteen, asking for their right for fair exams. Now there had been ongoing protests at Jantar Mantar earlier as well, be it the farmers’ protests, wrestlers’ protests, climate activists… but no one had paid much heed to them.
However, this time multiple narratives were unfolding simultaneously, which made this protest very different. I heard young voices speak with utmost confidence and clarity. I saw parents supporting their children. I witnessed people from all walks of life joining the protest; I watched chants of solidarity. Teachers and celebrities joined too. The protest started to sprout in multiple cities across the country. Nobody would have expected it, but once the movement snowballed, it couldn’t be controlled by any force, and the government had to eventually sack the minister.
I stood numb as I watched the events unfold. This is the generation that was mocked, and yet they ensured they got what they wanted. How could they do it? How were they able to pull it off? What was their framework? Did they even know what they were doing?
I have been racking my brain for weeks now. How could a generation become so different from all the previous ones? At least, we can’t boast and take any credit. And on top of it, this very generation was the one being labelled as irresponsible, lazy, and disrespectful!
All I knew was that there were thousands of memes, Snapchat dances, endless reels and YouTube shorts by Gen Z, almost like firsthand reporting by the protesters themselves. They protested the way they felt was right. They danced in front of water cannons, sang the national anthem to stop police from a lathi charge, and recorded themselves live while running away from police. They laughed, made fun of, and ridiculed the government. They made the rally look like an endless dance party while demanding their right to fair examinations. I was astonished by the way Gen Z created a new rule book and made everything else sound silly.
Gen Z unpacked power in a week. Who could have predicted the content velocity of memes and reels that made everything look ridiculously funny? Who could have imagined Gen Z enjoying themselves despite the atrocities? It didn’t make any sense. They actually used the machinery of worship to undo the worship. And it was all unplanned, on the go. They spread like wildfire, and they had the audacity to do it!
That’s when it hit me; they are first at many things. They are the first generation to be born in the lap of technology. The first generation to grow up alongside social media. That makes them far more adept at using it. They are the first generation to be born into a dismantled social structure of the twenty-first century. For sure, they do not follow old rules. They are the first ones who inherited a fractured world that was dealing with existential crises like climate change. They are the first young generation ever to have been exposed to so much of the world so early in life. They have adopted and adapted to the imperfect world.
Every previous generation, including Millennials, operated on caution. We were taught freedom came with duties. We were systemically taught to fear. Millennials fought with guilt built in. Resistance had to hurt to be legitimate. Suffering was the price of being serious. We were bound by the chains of our own limiting beliefs. My generation was taught that questioning power was dangerous, so we questioned carefully. We preferred our safety net.
And then comes Gen Z. They operate from a completely different script. Gen Z didn’t accept the premise that questioning power requires courage. They just went ahead…and questioned. Like it’s not a big deal. Like the world’s disapproval is information, not judgement. They didn’t shrink.
In the last month, the story flipped. I started asking different questions. Did Gen Z change the speed of narrative? Was power slower than the memes mocking it? Had ridicule become stronger simply because it travelled faster?
Gen Z’s relationship to authenticity is different. They seem to reject decorum, hierarchical respect, and performative seriousness. And what unfolded was power working differently when it was built on distributed networks (Gen Z as collective) rather than a singular image.
Until now, fear itself felt generational; we inherited it as a precondition of resistance; however, Gen Z didn’t. We were still asking for permission while they were already laughing their way at it. Gen Z didn’t invent ridicule as resistance, but they discovered the speed that makes it work.
What is the story of Gen Z? Are they enacting their own story? Is the story of Gen Z the story of fearlessness inherited from watching the generations before them fail?
I have watched the story change hands in India in the space of a week. If power survives through stories we agree to tell, what happens when nobody owns the story anymore? Whose story does it become?
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