Disclaimer: I understand that readers are quite passionate about the following content. The views and opinions that are expressed are mine and does not represent any organization or group of people. I’ve kept this neutral and strived to neither take sides nor be judgemental. Given the theme of this post, if you disagree with something, I would welcome a discussion. It would be my absolute pleasure to learn from what you have to teach me.
Now that we are done with the disclaimer, let’s move on..
During my engineering college days, some of my seniors riled us up and asked us to join them for a protest. It’s been so long that I don’t even remember what the protest was all about. However, as I recall, the naïve me back then woke up early on the day of the protest and went to the planned location – wondering how the day would go, and how large the student crowd would be. Seniors had expected a student crowd of over 200 people. Fact is, hardly 25 showed up. The whole protest fizzled out even before it began. That was my earliest experience of a protest.
Here is what I learnt from that experience:
The cause for any protest must be significant, thought provoking, and should be able to connect with the common man. Intent of the protest matters the most. Stronger the intent, stronger the commitment from the participants.
Protests need to be well organized and coordinated. There needs to be a thorough planning, detailed communication – right from the organizers to the participants. Clearer the communication, robust is the participation.
Strong will to face the consequences, be it positive or negative.
Peaceful protests as well as violent ones have a common thing. Impact.
Even as the world battled the pandemic, protests continued to occur everywhere. It is therefore not a surprise that the global economic and political landscape will always have protests as an integral part of it. Just look at the below figure showing the trend of protests for the year 2020. This is from the Global Protest Tracker by Carnegie Endowment for World International Peace that shows crucial trends worldwide. Read more...
