The pop of a teargas canister, billows of smoke, and a sea of humans – coughing, sputtering, merging into one indistinguishable mass. Students clutching posters, holding on to the hands of friends. Climbing over barricades like they do not exist. Moving in a collective thrum. The week of India’s youth protests was one of images. Images which had a phantasmagoric quality, attesting to a solidarity cutting across class, caste, and religion lines, open to everyone, welcoming of everyone. Even someone like me, who, initially attended out of sheer curiosity; to see how a movement that had originated online was translating offline. I, for one, have never sat for a competitive exam. I have ambled my way through school and college. Paper leaks, regardless of which decade or government, have existed only as headlines for me. I am wary of sermons on the need to reform the education system, to transform our antiquated institutions. Don’t they know the rot runs deep? The graph between cynicism and hope is not plotted in a straight line. After the CAA-NRC protests were forced into oblivion by propaganda, it made sense to carry a healthy – if infuriating – dose of cynicism around. But on occasion, it’s difficult to not let hope seep in. As I mapped out these thoughts at the beginning of the week that was, thousands began descending on Delhi – those who really had suffered, those who were due to suffer. They came determined to be seen. While reading and talking about schemes and policies that favour job creation or address systemic problems in the education system, it becomes easy to reduce individuals to data points. It goes without saying that the reality of lives perpetually on hold is stark: what Jantar Mantar highlighted was far from the first examination questions leak or the first protest. Students, particularly those growing up in the vast dominion of public education and witness to its decay, are fighters; naturals at digging their heels in. But it was the perfectly timed union of an insensitive comment and a fatally online generation that became the clincher. What started out as one of several exam paper leak protests morphed into something impossible to categorise. It became a cumulative sigh of relief. Finally, something was happening. I, though, was circumspect. On July 20, when the police attacked the mostly peaceful protesters, the fight now lived in the body, as unending images of RAF forces dragging young men and women, male cops hitting female protesters, testified. Time was marked not by the clock but by every possible variety of shoe, bereft of foot. Kolhapuris and sneakers at odd angles, suspended mid-movement. A ballet flat in the shrubbery of a roundabout. An abandoned, sad-looking flip flop trampled upon by the black boots of those in Delhi police uniforms. A dusty slipper lay next to a used, ashy teargas canister, its companion disappeared. This was the wreckage, what had been left behind. But it was an end that represented a beginning. Photo: Antara Baruah.The tenor shifted. The numbers were now unstoppable. Being part of the collective, the anonymity it offered, and the knowledge that we were all, at some level, bound by a shared purpose was the scaffolding I was looking for. Just like fear lodges itself in the body, hope did too. A protest site is understood as being a liminal space, as pointed out by an acquaintance on Instagram – within and without, real and unreal. Liminal spaces “exist as means to an end, to be travelled through but not lingered in,” writes Madelyne Xiao in The New Yorker. Almost as soon as Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, layers of white paint were hurled onto the graffiti, videos were erased off Instagram, and the same thousands were pushed home. What is appealing about liminal spaces is that they come without definition, and ask to be filled in. Nothing is permanent in this transitional, fluid space; instead, it is always being shaped and reshaped. The cockroach protest was no different, with the atmosphere being under constant renovation. Sometimes it was rowdy, other times comically altruistic. The acts of service were endless. I was offered biryani by a kind, bespectacled gentleman only because my sister and I ‘looked’ like we were going for the protest. Everyone was manoeuvring around each other, emboldened by the sheer numbers – drunk on what they could achieve. As someone lingering on the periphery, for whom the stakes are far lower, I saw how expansive desperation can be; it can accommodate everyone. Also read: As India’s Growth Model Runs Out of Jobs for the Middle Class, Will Protests Fill the Streets?In effect, there was a distinct sense of unreality that ran through it all for me. This fear that, other than the violence, none of it could happen again. That’s also perhaps why one wanted to be there; if only to soak up a moment in time. The entire spectrum of human emotion was on display. It was a little world built on coexistence: anger seated next to joy, humour, leaning on resilience. This was an event that will be dissected for years to come. It was a protest by and for young people. In a lot of ways, it was unmoored, more an outpouring of emotion than astute politics. But among other things, what needs to be remembered is the intensity of desire. In your teenage years, a lot feels like a life-and-death matter. But what about when the circumstances afflicting your life are actually a life-and-death matter. These circumstances are varied – depending on the layers of religion, caste, class, patriarchy, misgovernance – but ultimately, at Jantar Mantar, they fused to create a space that was about working through collective anguish. It wasn’t just the site itself. Spending hours watching protest reels was invigorating. And it might sound ridiculous to say, but within the brain-rot, was hope. It felt like a fever dream. There was a delirious, otherworldly feel to it, even as what was being asked was so fundamental as accountability on the part of those in power.Watching the video that qualifies as the prime minister’s first acknowledgement of what happened at Jantar Mantar was another kind of jarring. It was like watching a masterclass in deceit, where the truth – of violence and FIRs – is deliberately obfuscated, and what you have in its place, is this farcical idea of a youth that has been led astray. I have grown up during the years of the Modi government. Technically, I do not know anything else. What’s most familiar is the delusion. Overhearing conversations in the elevator about India’s newly towering place in the world, the ubiquity of angry Hanuman stickers, and being told that this is the best it’s ever been. There is no nostalgia. Instead, there is a restlessness for what doesn’t exist, what has not been experienced – a glimpse of which one catches in family conversations, archival encounters and literature. And that’s why there was something so euphoric about the sheer audacity of young people, people my age, imagining another world. Antara Baruah is a freelance journalist. She can be reached on baruah.antara@gmail.com.