When gals give ‘gaalis’, a revolution kicks off | OPINION

When all is said and done, what’s most remarkable about the recent Gen Z protest is the way it was all said. Peppered with profanity and scandalously irreverent, it made a bonfire of the vanities of the high and the haughty.

Its message struck home. You can ward off an argument with rhetoric, you can trash a claim by faking facts, but how can you put a lid on off-colour jokes which hit with on-target precision?

He-who-cannot-be-named was shamed, and what once could only be whispered, found itself WhatsApped around the world.

Unlike others that came before, this movement flaunted its many women drivers. Gen Z girls came to the party with fire in their bellies and flame in their nostrils, and they had just the right language for the occasion. They best expressed themselves in words which ran only into four letters. No mild, milk-biscuit invectives for them. These girls used scalding stuff and the lines exploded like pre-Diwali firecrackers.

Mainstream media realised that many of these girls’ slogans had to be beeped out or adorned with asterisks to make them publicly palatable.

This had seldom happened before. In the bad old days, most people believed in a pious myth. We believed women did not know what swear words meant.

In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, when the matriarch of the house goes full blast at a labourer, everyone within earshot is surprised that the elderly lady even knows such high-voltage Malayalam. That was in the 1990s. Since then, feminist films have mapped the increasingly capacious vocabulary of women.

But what was said on screen did not make it to the campus until Gen Z hit the streets. Then along with demanding a clutch of 'azadis' from other repressions, they also cut the chains and unshackled language. It signalled a far-reaching victory for gender equality.

Profanity punctures patriarchy and related social evils. What we have seen and heard is just the tip of the iceberg. There are other freedoms brimming beneath the surface. Freedom to think for themselves, to act, to believe and write their own agenda. 

Many roads lead beyond Jantar Mantar, and one wonders which turn this movement will choose to take. Shakespeare’s Caliban said, “You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to cuss.”

But Gen Z won’t rest content with such illusionary achievements as cussing at will, cracking risqué jokes, and looking cool to friends. When a new door has opened to the future, you don’t sit around doing nothing consequential. You will, I am sure, go ahead and inscribe a new page in the history of society. And to think that it all began with ****.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.