Every age requires its heroes, said Carlyle, but his heroes – the prophet, the poet, the priest, men of letters, kings – belonged to a world gone by. If we take the evolution of Western literature as an indication, it appears that the scope of human self-awareness has moved from its beginnings in identification with godlike heroes, through a steady diminishment of heroic stature until, today, the "hero" in fiction is almost exclusively a victim.
In democracies today, everything is pared down to a quotidian scale. The hero is an ordinary individual who finds himself compelled by circumstance to challenge entities infinitely larger than himself. The antagonist is no longer a vengeful god or ineluctable Fate, but is as inscrutable, uncaring and indifferent – the bureaucracy – before which the ordinary citizen finds himself powerless. The battles, asymmetric to the point of absurdity, are fought in offices, in the public sphere, on digital platforms, on social media and, ultimately, in the courtroom. Yet their heroism is no less compelling.
Before considering what these heroes represent, it is worth briefly recounting what they actually did.
Vedant Shrivastava, aged seventeen, is the face of the challenge to CBSE's evaluation process. Unbelieving of the low marks awarded to him, he applied for re-evaluation. That is when he allegedly discovered that the answer sheet supplied to him was different from the one he had originally written. Rather than quietly accepting the discrepancy, he documented it, placed the evidence in the public domain, and persisted despite ridicule and political abuse. His achievement lay not merely in complaining, but in forcing an institution to answer questions it would rather have avoided.
Nisarga Adhikary, aged nineteen, identified vulnerabilities in CBSE's digital infrastructure and, in what appears to have been an act of genuine good faith, reportedly disclosed them to the authorities first. When corrective action was not forthcoming, he went public with his findings. The sequence matters: he tried the proper channels before he tried the public ones.
Sarthak Sidhant, all of eighteen, undertook the most painstaking task of all. He scrutinised tender documents, procurement records, corrigenda and bidding conditions relating to the On-Screen Marking system and, through careful comparison of successive versions, established that critical eligibility conditions had been altered in ways that allegedly favoured a particular vendor. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the documents, but assuming them to be genuine, his analysis reveals a pattern whose implications any regulator worth the name ought to examine. Whatever conclusions one ultimately draws, the diligence of the investigation stands as a remarkable act of civic engagement by a student.
Together, they punched holes in the entire system. The first questioned the integrity of the evaluation process. The second exposed vulnerabilities in the technological architecture. And the third scrutinised the procurement decisions that lay behind the system itself. Between them, they challenged the process, the platform and the procurement. They accomplished what institutions, regulators and much of the media had failed to do: they brought under the critical gaze of the nation an issue affecting millions of students.
How happy I am to be proved so wrong in my scepticism about whether the younger generation knows which way to go. (See my previous post: The Cockroach Party.) They do. They have not taken to the streets, have not burnt buses, nor vandalised public property. They have taken on the establishment on its own turf and on its own terms, forcing accountability through reason rather than rage. The government will find that a rather difficult thing to quietly dispose of.
