Protest is a form of speech that a society employs to communicate with itself.

You do not protest in public, shout and scream, chant slogans and hold placards on an ordinary day. You do it but rarely. You do it when you are outraged.

And when you do protest, you want to be heard.

I have been interested lately in protest, though I must say there’s a lot more to say about Jantar Mantar.

I wonder why those who protest are no longer being heard, leading them, sometimes, to wonder if they are being pushed to the wall, a wall they’ll have to break down with a gun.

But I wonder, equally, if the protestors are listening only to themslves. Communication, after all, is not about one-way speaking. Communication is also about listening.

When you shout ‘Sangharsh Hamara Nara Hai!’, you are reiterating what I honestly see as a outdated form of protest where you reiterate that resistance is an end in itself. Theatre of the oppressed, slogans of “Down! Down!”, distributing press releases and making people sign on paper that’s eventually going to go in the dust bin – does it all serve a purpose anymore?

In a small town or in rural India it still may, but not in Delhi. In this age of communication, it has in fact become more difficult to communicate. Nobody listens to you on the street. They may even think you are a loony.

When the reservations hungama was taking place this time last year, why do you think members of “Youth for Equality”, mostly students of medicine, were wearing lab coats while protesting? For the reason that media coverage, even in print, is driven by image. If you wear a lab coat, and a stethoscope, you can be identified as a doctor. They are symbols of “merit”, props of the play you are enacting before your audience.

A large, vociferous group of doctors and students protesting in favour of reservations in the sqame campus: I told them, why don’t you wear lab coats in your protests? Perhaps you may get some more coverage?

But they didn’t listen to me. They went about their sangharsh.

If you look at successful activist campaigns in the last one year or so, they were all outside this obsolote mode of protest. Reservations, Jessica Lal, Priyadarshini Mattoo. You may say these got airtime and column inches for other reasons. And you are not wrong. But these were also campaigns that understood how today’s media works.

And if you want an example you would be more disposed to buy, Google for “Blank Noise Project”.