im all polyester inside

There are two mystical forces in the world. First is the force of nature. It is pure and righteous. But yao… it’s a different force entirely. It is born against nature. In defiance of heaven and earth. In defiance even of death.

At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)

What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.

These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.

But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.

3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.

For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.

For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.

After weeks of protests, the government finally listened. whaaaaaaaaa The 1st demand was the resignation of a Union Education Minister and in a parliamentary system like ours, where the cabinet is supposed to move as one, that is a massssssssive deal.

What's wild is how this whole movement got its start. It began with a Supreme Court justice calling unemployed youth "cockroaches" because we're unemployed and just have nothing better to do than crib. Then some guy made an ig account which quickly picked up followers, crossed a threshold the app had never seen before and ofc the government response was to ban it. So the guy just made it again. And somewhere in there, the nation hit its tipping point. e20 fuel, a really badddd fuel policy, ram mandir donation scandal, one thing stacked on another (I'm probably missing several more because there was the Olympic athlete protest, which was painful to see in the mainstream media because they literally villainized our athletes). Anyway point is that this government has never shown accountability. It's nearly impossible to get it to the table for an actual dialogue.

And this is the moment genz chose to be in the crowd. it gained credibility when Sonam Wangchuk stepped in. From there it just grew. Honestly, it's almost beside the point what I'm saying about it. what matters is watching something build like that and everyone slowly realizing this was never just about one exam or one leaked paper.

chetan bhagat put it well ( not too perfectly tho): you have a fight with your husband because he didn't put a plate back in the dishwasher and you don't speak for two days. Is the fight really about the plate? No. India is at a tipping point and today's resignation is a signal of something much bigger.

I'm 25, unemployed, never had a full-time job. yOU can imagine how obsessively I've followed the news for years and I have never seen a dent in the Modi government this size. Granted, the farmers protest was monumental but it took very long. The climate right now iz electric, what's happening across south Asia right now feels bigger than any one protest.

I used to assume people on the ground would never see through the propaganda, that we'd always be blindsided by Hindu-Muslim politics distracting from everything else. Then came the 2024 Lok Sabha results. For a government that has manipulated the voting system itself, having an opposition holding 100 seats was huge. It told me people can see the problem. And even though the movement wasn't carried by the biggest celebrities or public figures, the fact that it grew this large on its own made everyone feel like it was safe to show up. It made me feel strangely empowered like change is actually still possible. Watching your pm upload video after video trying to appeal to Gen Z shows no one is too small to have a voice. Don't ever think otherwise.

For the longest time I never really believed something like what Bhagat Singh did for the independence movement could happen again. He was so young and the movies we grew up on paint him as radical and purely aggressive. But his fight was ideological at its core, one of his real points was that India had gotten too used to oppression, too comfortable with it. People were inspired by that and it fed the next wave of the independence movement.

What I'm watching now feels like an echo of that. These kids at Jantar Mantar who walked straight into pellet guns and lathis studded with nails. It is one thing to sit back and say "they're unemployed, they've got nothing better to do, it's just a pastime." No. Absolutely not. I, like many others, have people in my own family who don't get it. Or the ones who say "okay, one minister resigned, now what, the system's still the same." And they're right that the system is still the same, we still grow up chasing whichever competition exam we're told to prepare for, an exam that only rewards the people at the very top while everyone else is treated like a cockroach with no real options. That's its own separate, deeper problem. But dismissing this moment because it's "just NEET" or "just one exam" means you haven't understood what actually happened here.

I wish people everywhere understood this is a genuine signal that the government cannot stay tight-lipped anymore. This is a massive step. I hope India keeps rising from here, that we keep voting with our eyes open, watching what our MPs actually do. I know the road is long.

Being critical of your government is a deeper form of patriotism than pretending anti-incumbency means you're against the nation. Being critical isn't a betrayal of the country it's what being invested in it looks like. This government and its paid mainstream media has been the biggest gaslighter in this,