Sourav Ganguly’seighteen year old daughter, Sana, is said to have posted a message on Instagram, against the CAA. But loving father that he is, Sourav has said, that ‘she is too young a girl to know about Indian politics!’

And in that statement lies the snooty, snigger and smirks greeting the cries and protests of students all over India.

“You are children!”

“You are being manipulated!”

“You are too young to know about Indian politics!”

So, Dada, when did you start playing cricket for your state? When you were eighteen wasn’t it? Or have you forgotten? Did you understand the game? Or do think it was just a children’s game, of which now at the age of 47 you have become president off?

As I listened to student protestors from all over India, speaking out on TV, I realized, how intelligent, decisive and articulate they were.

And maybe that is what politicians, most of whom have, if at all, scraped through their schools or bluffed their degrees, need to know, that education gives you the power to analyze, to think, to probe into the deeper meaning of things, and to open up for scrutiny, lies, that the uneducated accept as gospel truth.

Also, it’s only in politics, even cricket politics, that seniority counts, whereas in todays corporate world, people like the forty seven year oldGanguly, would have been serving under a thirty or thirty five year old boss.“And he wouldn’t even call you Dada!”

“Would you call him ‘too young’MrGanguly?” I’m sure you wouldn’t, seasoned politician that you are.

So, also the politician, if he was working anywhere else other than the secure walls of Parliament, would have been like Sourav, serving under one of these youngsters.

These in colleges are not the vote banks of the country. Vote banks get swayed en masse. Like a herd of sheep, they follow blindly, trusting completely in rhetoric and scripts written for good actors.

Vote banks are what brings wrong men and women to power, while thinkers are those who can see beyond.

And yet, we call these the thinkers of India, naïve, ‘too young’ and impressionable?

What a laugh!

Wake up India! These socalled children you are firing upon, hurling tear gas onto and brandishing your lathis on are today’s generation!

They are ‘not too young’, they know more than you and I do.

It is not they, the educated who have been manipulated, it is we who have been.

If the father of Sana could play for his state at eighteen! If Sachin could have played for his country at even less, shouldn’t we stop thinking of them as ‘young’ and start thinking of them as ‘mature educated thinkers’ who are showing us, and here I quote Shakespeare, ‘that there is ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark..!’

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