'Go be the prime minister’, my dad would say every time I said something remotely critical of the government. ‘You can’t change anything just by talking about it’, he would say every time I said something needed to be done.

I always thought he made sense: if I wanted something done, I should be doing something to get it done. I’d speak to people around me and form opinions too, but also feel disheartened that it made no impact. And then came 25 July, the day India’s Union minister of education resigned and I realised that just by supporting what I felt was right, I could make an impact.

In the beginning of June this year, a satirical campaign launched by Abhijeet Dipke as a response to India’s unemployed youth being called ‘cockroaches’ made it out of Instagram, my favourite app on earth, on to Jantar Matar, to protest the NEET examination leak and India’s broken education system that it had come to symbolise.

At least 21 students had died by suicide due to this leak. A lot of hearts including mine cried for these students. Just two years ago, I was taking multiple entrance tests, and to see students die because of something that could have been avoided and controlled made me angry. So a lot of us took to the streets.

Initially, when I joined the protest, I had no........

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