i’ll roll you over & turn your bad side out 💞✨🤙

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

like yeah the clear exhaustion and delirium they end up with can make for hilarious performances (to the point I've needed to use my inhaler from laughing so much) but on both a human and a storytelling level, I don't want these people so exhausted and overwhelmed they can't even fully explain why they made the character decisions they did (or understand why other players might be reacting with confusion or frustration).

I don't want Brennan to have to end the show with a direct to camera psa spelling out what was supposed to be the entire message of the story because basically none of those plot points or themes were resolved in a too short season and rushed, unhinged finale. I don't want Brennan to say "I feel good that we had one solid beat of pathos and stakes", and also that he realised he fucked up and put them in an "off" vibe at the end of the penultimate episode that they couldn't get away from because the episodes were shot back-to-back.

I don't want them to be given only a handful of days in quick succession playing these characters with no opportunity to breath, rest, reflect or re-calibrate on who those characters are, why they're making the choices they are, how they fit into the story/world, what their personal arc could involve, or how their storylines will end.

I want the players to be having fun with their friends, that's obviously a big part of the draw of d20, but the other side of that is that they're not just friends hanging out — they're filming a show. they're specifically there to create a satisfying story together for an audience to watch.

members of the Donner Party

nuns/monks during The Black Plague

single celled organisms in primordial soup

Oceangate passengers

wind and rock erosion in the Grand Canyon

survivors of the Great Molasses Flood

two colliding continents in Pangea

barnacles stuck to the fins of a whale

the mass of two disintegrated stars meeting at the event horizon

tenants on Broad Street during the 1854 Cholera epidemic

the tail and the head of the Ouroborous