There is an irony to the smell of food when you are standing beside people who have chosen to go hungry. Long before I reached Jantar Mantar last weekend, the air was thick with masala chai, frying eggs and buttered toast, the familiar smells of Delhi carrying on as usual. Just beyond the barricades, students sat in solidarity with Sonam Wangchuk and Abhijeet Dipke, surrounded by handmade placards, patriotic songs, poetry and conversation, holding on to the belief that peaceful protest still has a place in this country.
It made me think about hunger, not merely as a physiological need, but as something far more political. There is, of course, the hunger for power, the kind that convinces those entrusted with public office that accountability is somehow negotiable, that outrage will eventually subside and memory will fade. Then there is the hunger I encountered at Jantar Mantar, quieter perhaps, but infinitely more resolute, the hunger for justice, which compels young people to sleep on concrete pavements, return each morning despite the exhaustion, and continue demanding answers for lives lost to institutional negligence.
I had carried a box of homemade parathas with me, wrapped carefully in foil before leaving home, not because I imagined they would make any real difference, but because it felt instinctive to cook before showing up. I offered parathas to a student sitting cross-legged on a tarp. He accepted two of them with a smile, and then immediately called over two friends, and divided them equally between the three of them. As I reached back into the box to offer him another, he stopped me. "Please give those to someone else," he said. "Others haven't eaten either." I have found myself returning to that moment repeatedly over the past few days, because it revealed something I had not expected.
We often imagine protests as places defined almost exclusively by anger, and there was certainly anger here, as there should have been. But what lingered far more powerfully was the instinct to care.
Having spent the better part of the past few days at the site, I watched that instinct organise itself into an entire ecosystem of care. Meals arrived at all hours of the day and night. People who could not physically join the protest sent supplies through delivery applications, while volunteers collected every parcel and distributed it. It struck me that, in that moment, mobile phones had become instruments not of distraction but of solidarity, allowing people to participate in the only way they could.
Delhi is so often dismissed as transactional, impatient and emotionally detached that we almost repeat the stereotype without questioning it. Yet what I witnessed at Jantar Mantar offered a very different portrait of the city, one where home kitchens extended themselves into public spaces, delivery riders unknowingly became part of a movement larger than the order they were carrying, and complete strangers instinctively looked after one another without asking who they voted for, where they came from, or whether they would ever meet again.
For all the barricades, police presence and uncertainty that surrounded the protest, I had rarely felt more at ease in a public space, because I was surrounded by people who had chosen compassion. The loudest demand at Jantar Mantar was for accountability. Running alongside it, however, was another story altogether, one that perhaps deserves just as much attention, that in the face of neglect, ordinary people had refused to let one another go hungry, reminding me that even in moments when institutions fail us, communities often do not.