Picture the ‘crime scene’: a boy walks out of his school gate under a sun that could fry an egg on the pavement, sweat soaking through his uniform, and a reporter blocks his path with a microphone. 

The boy is tired, thirsty, and cornered on a public street by a grown man with a camera crew. He answers the question he is asked, plainly, the way children do before anyone teaches them to speak in careful little circles. 

He says the heat is unbearable and the people running the schools have done nothing about it except watching from “AC“ chambers. 

That’s the whole offense, and many Kashmiris responded as though he had confessed to treason on live television.

Businessmen who run private schools got the outrage rolling first, condemning the boy “on behalf of the public” as though anyone had appointed them to that job. 

There’s an old line worth borrowing here: a fish rots from the head, and this particular fish had a lot of company rotting alongside it. 

Senior journalists, decades of bylines between them, used their own platforms to lecture a child about tone. Self-described educators, people paid to understand young minds, went so far as to endorse corporal punishment as the........

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