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New Delhi: “I feel so guilty.”

It is not a phrase one hears too often at a public protest. Yet I have been hearing it with increasing frequency at the Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar. The people saying those words, incidentally, are parents of Gen Z youth who have come to the site to express solidarity with the protestors.

Seema, a resident of Gurgaon, and mother of a 24-year-old who has graduated from IIT says:

“The news of students dying by suicide after the NEET leaks has been haunting me, and my sense of guilt has been increasing by the day. Finally, I just had to come here and meet these brave students who have been fasting for over two weeks. I tried to fast for just one day and I couldn’t. I can’t imagine how they are doing it under these conditions.”

Ekta, an architect from south Delhi also says:

“I feel guilty that my own kids attend private schools and have none of the problems the vast majority of kids in this country are facing. Coming here and speaking to these brave students fasting here, I realise that we the privileged one percent. I am surrounded by parents whose primary concern is ‘What are the items on the menu in the school canteen?’ I want to tell them, ‘Please wake up! We will pack our kids off to foreign universities but what happens to the vast majority of kids in India who have the right to a  good education, but no access to it’!”

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