A few days ago, my Instagram feed suddenly had a lot of kachoris and samosas. Not because Delhi had discovered a new food festival, but because of one line that had somehow managed to travel everywhere:
“Ek kachori, do samosa, in mardon ka kya bharosa.”
The slogan came out of protests around women’s safety after the alleged gang r*pe of a 17-year-old girl at Aastha Kunj Park in Delhi. Women took to the streets, colleges joined in, posters appeared and slogans were shouted. Some were angry, some clever, some very Gen Z.
And naturally, the internet did what the internet does best. It made them content.
The kachori-samosa line travelled from a protest to Instagram Reels, memes and remixes. Within days, variations of the same rhyme were being used in completely unrelated protests too. Somewhere between the original incident and the hundredth Reel using the same format, I started wondering what exactly we had made viral.
Was it the message, or just the template?
Because those are two very different things.
They came from an incident horrifying enough on its own, and from a much larger frustration that women in this country have been expressing for decades: the inability to simply exist in public without constantly calculating risk.
Can I take this road after 8 PM? Should I share my location? Is this cab route normal? Is this man actually following me? Should I call someone until I reach home?
For a lot of women, these aren't dramatic questions. They are routine ones.
And somehow, a few swipes later, the internet had found its newest catchphrase.
Maybe that is just how movements work in 2026. Or maybe we should occasionally ask what happens after the hashtag stops being fun.
The Part After the Protest
I actually like that people come out on the streets.
A democracy where people are angry enough to demand accountability is far healthier than one where everybody has simply accepted whatever happens to them. Protest has always been an important part of change, and India itself has enough examples to prove that.
The outrage after the 2012 Delhi gang r*pe wasn't merely symbolic. It forced a national conversation, pushed institutions to respond and contributed to significant changes in criminal law. So dismissing protests as useless would be both unfair and historically wrong.
But a protest can force a door open. It cannot build everything behind that door.
That part is much less exciting.
It is improving policing, fixing street lights, designing safer public spaces, making courts move faster and building institutions that people can actually trust. It is teaching boys what consent means long before somebody has to teach men what punishment means. It is calling out your friend when he says something disgusting instead of laughing because everyone else did.
None of these make particularly good Reels.
Nation-building has terrible engagement metrics.
In the Aastha Kunj case itself, reporting later pointed towards concerns around poorly lit areas, inadequate surveillance and broken boundaries around parts of the park. That is the less glamorous side of change: somebody has to inspect a light, file a report, allocate money, maintain a camera and then make sure it is still working six months later.
You need the person holding the placard, obviously.
But you also need the person fixing the light.
Probably more than once.
The Spectrum
Infrastructure, though, is only one part of this.
There is another kind of infrastructure we don't talk about nearly enough: men.
Sometimes I think the range of what it means to be a man in India is absurdly wide. At one end, there is a man whose entire understanding of power depends on making somebody else feel smaller. He wants to control where a woman goes, what she wears, who she talks to, or how much freedom she is allowed. At its ugliest extreme, strength becomes physical domination simply because that is the only version of authority he understands.
And somewhere else in the same country, there is another man sitting inside a research centre, working under or alongside a woman scientist on a spacecraft that will travel farther than either of them ever will.
More than a hundred women had significant roles in Chandrayaan-3, including responsibilities across spacecraft configuration, testing, mission operations and navigation.
Same species. Same country. Same gender.
Entirely different understanding of strength.
That is the male spectrum I keep thinking about.
And I don't think it is as simple as educated versus uneducated, rich versus poor, urban versus rural, or conservative versus liberal. Those categories make the discussion easier, but reality keeps ruining them. Educated men can behave terribly too. A degree can teach you mathematics, law, engineering or economics. Apparently it cannot guarantee character.
Perhaps the spectrum is better measured with one question:
How much of your idea of being a man depends on having power over someone else?
A man who is comfortable being taught by a woman, reporting to a woman, losing an argument to a woman, earning less than a woman, being rejected by a woman or simply hearing no from a woman requires something we strangely don't associate enough with masculinity.
Security.
You don't need to establish dominance every five minutes when you aren't terrified of losing it.
Freedom Is Bigger Than Clothes
Whenever conversations about women's freedom happen in India, somehow clothes arrive before anything else.
Short clothes, traditional clothes, Western culture, Indian culture. It is almost impressive how efficiently an entire discussion about human freedom can be converted into fabric measurements.
Of course, the freedom to choose what you wear matters. But if that is where our definition of women's independence ends, it is painfully small.
Freedom is also being able to choose a college without first asking whether the road outside it is safe after 7 PM. It is taking a job in another city, coming home late without fear becoming part of the journey, choosing whether to marry, choosing whom to marry, or choosing not to marry at all.
It is having money that is yours. It is being taken seriously in a meeting before somebody notices that you are the only woman there. It is being ambitious without being called difficult, assertive without being called arrogant and independent without that somehow becoming a character flaw.
And perhaps most importantly, it is being ordinary without needing to be brave.
A society has not made women free merely because some women became exceptional enough to overcome it. We love stories about the woman who fought everything, proved everyone wrong and became successful despite the odds.
They are inspiring stories.
But a better society would require fewer of them.
The real test is whether a completely ordinary woman can live a completely ordinary Tuesday without thinking about her gender every twenty minutes.
Equality Is a Strange Destination
My instinct has always been that the ideal society is one where men and women aren't constantly separated into opposing teams.
Different bodies, yes. Different people, obviously. Different opinions, personalities, capabilities and ambitions too.
But equal dignity, equal opportunity and an equal right to occupy space.
I would love a world where saying woman scientist sounds as unnecessary as saying male software engineer.
We are clearly not there.
And this is where equality becomes complicated, because treating everybody identically and treating everybody fairly are not always the same thing. You cannot undo generations of unequal access simply by announcing one morning that the starting line is now equal.
Sometimes protections, representation and specific interventions are necessary precisely because the starting line was never identical in the first place. Even our Constitution holds both ideas at once: equality regardless of gender, while also allowing specific provisions for women and children.
The destination, though, should still be a society where those corrections slowly become less necessary because equality has moved beyond legislation and into everyday culture.
Maybe someday words like patriarchy and feminism will sound like vocabulary from a history chapter describing a problem humanity already solved.
I'd quite like that.
But declaring the words unnecessary before the problem disappears would be like uninstalling the fire alarm because we are tired of hearing it.
Slightly premature.
We Are Very Good at Being Angry
India is young. We say that proudly all the time.
Young population. Demographic dividend. Youth will build the nation.
But being young does not automatically make us builders. It only means the responsibility eventually lands on our desk.
And I think our generation has become extremely good at reacting.
Something happens and within hours we have posts, stories, graphics, hashtags, slogans and videos. Someone finds the perfect background song. Someone else finds the perfect rhyme. For a few days, everybody is furious together.
Then the algorithm finds something new.
That is not necessarily hypocrisy. Human attention is limited, and nobody can live permanently outraged. But the harder question is what remains in us after the anger leaves.
Did the man who posted the women's-safety story stop forwarding that video of a woman in his boys' group?
Did somebody finally tell his friend that bothering a girl at a club isn't harmless flirting just because he thinks it is funny?
Did parents give their daughter more freedom, or did they simply buy her pepper spray and keep the same curfew?
Did a college improve the route outside its gate? Did a police station become easier for a woman to approach? Did we raise our sons differently?
Did anything become boringly, permanently better?
Because revolutions look fantastic in photographs.
Reform usually looks like paperwork.
Maybe Another Yug
I don't think there is a grand solution here.
Certainly not one I have discovered while sitting with a laptop.
Women in this country have been asking for safety, dignity and freedom long before Instagram gave us carousel posts to explain them. Men have probably been struggling with ideas of power, masculinity and identity long before anyone gave those conversations modern terminology either.
Maybe the dream is that one day we simply look at each other as humans first. Men and women will obviously remain different in many ways, and there is nothing wrong with that. Equality was never supposed to mean sameness.
It should simply mean that those differences don't decide whose voice matters more, whose ambitions deserve more space or who gets to feel safer walking home.
Maybe reaching that point is too optimistic.
Maybe that is for another yug.
But there is still a lot of distance we can cover in this one.
So protest when something is wrong. Be loud enough that institutions cannot pretend they didn't hear you. Make the slogan clever if clever makes people listen. Make the Reel too, if that makes the message travel.
But when the crowd goes home, the work cannot go home with it.
Because a country is ultimately not built by the slogans its people shout when they are angry. It is built much more quietly, through the kind of institutions we demand, the behaviour we tolerate, the children we raise and the kind of people we choose to be when nobody is watching.
And perhaps that is where the male spectrum matters most.
Not in deciding whether all men are trustworthy or untrustworthy.
But in deciding, one man at a time, which end of that spectrum we are moving towards.