In his seminal work On the Evolution of Species, Charles Darwin describes how organisms evolve over generations through a process of ‘natural selection’, which alters inherited physical or behavioural traits in various species for their survival. This conclusion, mind you, was voiced in 1859, way before the theory and technology for capturing genetic mutation arrived. This sophisticated technology later brought forth data to support Darwinian observations.Ironically, the Chief Justice of India was right when he expressed a certain horror at the hordes of India’s young jobless taking to streets like bands of cockroaches. Cockroaches belong to a certain ancient species of roachoids who, for over 3 million years, have survived waves of mass extinction of mega life forms like dinosaurs, numerous wars and even nuclear challenges. How did they do it you may ask. First, they have made sure they appear to be nothing, but are everything and without them nothing will be anything because they are Mother Nature’s scavengers for surviving with minimal resources and cleaning all sorts of messes. Their key traits are flat oval bodies, tough outer shells and rapid reproduction. They have also developed mouths that can detect threats as they chew. For example they will not eat sugar coated stuff including pesticides that kill lesser species. With this toolkit, cockroaches easily drifted across continents starting with Asia and finally transitioned into an indoor species dependent for their survival on humans around 2100 years ago Germany. Over the past four centuries an increase in trade-based capitalism helped cockroaches hitchhike and become a global phenomena.The cockroaches of the CJP have revealed the same tenacity in surviving the full onslaught of the government’s might against their dharna (protest). They showed, not just to India but the world, New Delhi for what it is: a city scared of roaches that have spawned and grown in the last decade. Watching the strikes against it – ‘surgical’, ‘cathartic ’or tactical – the general impression was that the cockroaches as a species of young jobless humans were not easy to waive, crush and finish. Whether you were physically present at Jantar Mantar or like this writer, out of the country at that point in time, the images reached you. We saw the cockroaches having a good time laughing at the system as institutes, foundations, committees and a dozen new and old ministerial offices along Kartavya Path sat hunched over their TV screens and phones feeling miserable. What we all outside the cockroach area experienced can only be described as an addictive fascination about the terrible glamour of these gender inclusive hordes, their capacity to thrive on squalor, profanity and lathi charges, often with vital water and food blocked from reaching them. Like the cockroaches the Gen Z roaches are a comic, tragic and sturdy generation evolving with minimal equipment. With their smart phones they generated memes, placards, little videos on YouTube, some of which seemed pure genius. Smart phones in 2026 thanks to them have emerged as a new Gandhian instrument for mass mobilisation. How can anyone be hurt by songs and dances and rippling laughter that goes viral globally at the press of a button? Even the police and bystanders are nonplussed. In stark comparison to these unkempt but merry and excited gang the blow dried, carefully attired anchors in NOIDA appeared as pawns in a propaganda contest in which the cockroaches were clearly winning. If pre-2014 history of our democracy is a nightmare from which India is trying to awake, then the last 12 years can be seen as a blackout when the midnight’s children, and their children, parents to the millennials, were dumbed down by the media and barred from every conceivable fora for public debate. The Indian public, for the last decade, has been fed a diet of information through government-controlled digital technology. This, like a rancid milk stored in temperature-controlled rooms, helped them past the Covid years. But as the nation emerged in daylight after two years, there were ‘DO NOT ENTER’ signs once again hanging outside airless governmental buildings – re-designed, bigger, uglier and more guarded against independent media and citizens who still thought the laws worked. Boomer politicians and several superannuated but re-employed Boomers, who were so sure of their Superman-like powers over all species within the land, now see a new phenomena – a mass of Gen Z standing outside, demanding to be let in and talked to properly, not talked at or ordered. They are what they are. But please remember their capacity for devouring and surviving the foulest words from party spokies, booming police threats over megaphones and old-style semantic verticals released at the stroke of midnight when boomers and millennials are asleep.The answer to a predicament of this size needs to be at least the size of the predicament. It needs congruence. After ages, it has to be a debate about children, not parents or grand parents’ misdeeds. Betrayed by their previous generations, our children, like cockroaches, have reworked their own subspecies and are working in self defence. The state needs to take deep breaths, wipe its glasses and stare into their eyes for once and hear their side of the story in their own language.“If you ask me to name one species or organism I respect the most,” says Chow Yang Lee, eminent entomologist at the University of California, quoted by the National Geographic, “it is probably the cockroach.”Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.