I was waiting for my agents to complete some task, when Chief Justice Surya Kant’s cockroach line came through on my phone, and I laughed, which was the wrong reaction because the numero uno of justice shouldn’t be using dehumanizing language in any court, be alone the Supreme Court of India.

The line was that some young people are like cockroaches, who do not get any employment and have no place in a profession, and that they become journalists and social media activists and RTI campaigners and start attacking everyone. He said later that he meant the ones with fake degrees. Maybe he did.

The mascot, though. I have a soft spot for the cockroach, which is a strange sentence to write. We had them in the kitchen when I was a kid and my mother fought them with a broom and a tin of white powder, and they always came back. I am still fighting them and mostly winning but thats a post for another day.

Within a week the kids had turned the insult into a party. The Cockroach Janta Party, 20 million followers, more than the BJP and the Congress, and reels that are funnier than anything the IT cells have managed in ten years. I wrote in July that I was wrong about them, after twelve years of assuming every outrage cycle in this country ends with everyone going back to work, and I am not going to repeat that whole argument. But October is the part I want to talk about.

The fight is about whether the door is real, and the exam is only the first place they noticed that it wasn’t.

Two million kids sit NEET every year for about 130,000 seats. Do the arithmetic. The exam does not measure how good you are at medicine, it measures how far ahead of the boy at the next desk you managed to get, and when the only door is a rank then somebody will always sell a key. That is where the paper leak comes from, and it is easier to blame a rotten few, but a leak is the natural business model of a queue. Kota is a town that runs on the fear of those 130,000 seats, and half the economy there is a bet on a kid clearing an exam. Days after the 2026 exam the results were cancelled over leaked questions, and more than twenty students killed themselves in the weeks after. I am not going to make a clever point out of that. There isn’t one.

Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as education minister in July, after a march to Parliament and Sonam Wangchuk’s 26-day fast. A parody account with a cockroach mascot made a Union minister quit, which the opposition had not managed in years. I still find that hard to believe.

Then in October they moved to the voter list, because the SIR has struck 130 million people off the draft rolls, and they want the Chief Election Commissioner gone. In plain English; the list that proves you exist as a voter is being shrunk, and the people losing their names are not the ones who can afford a lawyer. On the 10th the police picked up three of their leaders off a flight at Delhi airport, barricaded Jantar Mantar, banned gatherings of five or more in parts of the capital, and throttled the internet. Two days later the administration removed Jantar Mantar from the list of designated protest sites. They moved the room. That line is too neat, and I am keeping it because it is literally what happened.

Why the young? Because they are the only ones who have to live in the answer. I can retire from this country in another thirty years. My kid cannot. When you are fifty-five you can walk away from a broken place, and when you are nineteen you have to build a life inside it.

“Why is Modi afraid of India’s young people?” a college student called Tanya Negi asked a reporter that day. I keep coming back to it. The answer is not complicated. They are the ones who will still be here.

Countries do not get rich on policy papers. They get rich because a generation believes that building at home is worth it, and that belief is not a mood, it is a calculation about whether the effort will be rewarded. When the calculation goes negative the ambitious leave first, and they are not the failures. They are the ones with options.

I heard the question “how do we become the best people of our generation” once, in a startup office, and it sounded ridiculous then and it sounds more ridiculous now, because the answer in this country is usually that you become the best by leaving. But the question does something to a room. It gives everyone permission to want more than the next salary hike, and I have never forgotten it.

I thought about leaving in 2003, when the only room available to a kid in India was a dial-up connection and a client in another timezone. I charged five dollars a page for WordPress glue because nobody here was going to pay a 22-year-old to be good at anything. That room arrived through a cable and a browser, and no ministry built it, and it was enough for one generation. We never built the second one. Now the same state that could not build it is busy locking the ones that exist.

The other thing nobody tells you is that being the best does not have to mean beating the boy at the next desk. In a country of two million candidates that sounds like a joke, and yet the people I know who are actually good at something became good at something nobody was ranking. The rank came later. Do we really want a country where the only way to be somebody is to beat somebody? I don’t think so.

What is a room, though. It is not a building and it is not a subsidy. It is somebody taking you seriously before you have proved anything, and letting you fail once without writing you off, and making an introduction without telling you how to live your life. The advice is usually wrong. I have been on both sides of that, and the introduction is the thing people remember.

So the room is the policy. A young person with a room does not need much from the state. He needs a school that works, an exam that is honest, a voter list with his name on it, and a policeman who does not pick him up at the airport for waving a flag.

I have a room in Bagdogra, a laptop, and a phone that rings with people who want to build something and cannot get twenty minutes of somebody’s attention. So here is my offer, and it is small. If you are young and building something and you cannot find a room, mail me at [email protected]. I will read it and reply. It is not a solution to the country’s problems. It is what one person can do while the country decides whether it wants to solve them.

Work is worship, and I believe that, but even worship needs a place to kneel. My generation’s job is to leave the room bigger than we found it, and the young people’s job is the effort nobody can make for them. If we keep teaching them that effort has no address, we will get a generation that stops knocking, and a country that gets old before it gets rich.

If you think I have this wrong, tell me. I am @troysk704.