Of All The Things, He Chose That One
On the NEET protests, the twenty-four hours of a seventeen-year-old, and where a family’s anger goes when it has one place to go.
Somewhere on Parliament Street in the last week of July, a boy stood holding a piece of cardboard.
He had been awake since five. He has been awake at five for two years. The protest changed nothing about his morning.
Before we come to what he was protesting, I want to count the other things he could have been angry about that day.
The air he woke up in. The forty minutes in traffic each way. The rent his father talks about at dinner. The job his cousin got and he is expected to match. The phone that took four hours from him yesterday and gave nothing back. The water that comes for two hours. The teacher who has not learned his name. The eleven kilos he has put on in two years of sitting. The girl he cannot tell anyone about. The mark he got in the January test, which was fine, and the silence that followed it at home, which stayed in the room for three days. The three years in which no adult has asked him a question that was not about marks.
Any of these would have held his anger. All of them are real. Most of them will outlast the examination.
He chose the paper leak.
I want to spend this essay on why.
First, the part that is settled
The paper leaked. This much is established and it deserves to be said plainly before anything else.
More than twenty lakh students sat NEET in 2026. They were competing for roughly 1.37 lakh MBBS seats, of which about sixty-three thousand sit in government colleges. Fewer than five in a hundred aspirants reach a government seat. The paper has now leaked three times in five years. The National Testing Agency cancelled the examination. The Central Bureau of Investigation was handed the case. A re-examination was announced. On 23 July the Prime Minister announced fast-track courts for paper-leak cases. On 25 July the Union Education Minister resigned.
A seventeen-year-old gives two years of his life to this exam. He gives up sleep, sport, friends, festivals and a large part of his adolescence. His family gives up money it does not always have. And then the paper he was going to sit was, before he ever saw it, already in someone else’s hands.
It is theft. It stole the one thing that was supposed to sit beyond reach, which is the promise that if you work, the work will be counted.
By late July, the demands at Jantar Mantar included compensation for the families of more than twenty students who had died by suicide since the cancellations.
So if your son or daughter stood on that road, they were right, and the anger was owed to them. Any adult who told them to go home and study had misread the moment.
The rest of this essay takes their anger as legitimate and asks a different question.
Why that one, out of twenty.
The answer to that sits in your house.
What happens to student movements
One piece of history first, because your children have walked into a pattern nobody has shown them.
On 20 December 1973, students at the L.D. College of Engineering in Ahmedabad went on strike. The grievance was a twenty per cent increase in the hostel food bill. That is the whole of it. A food bill.
Within three months the Chief Minister of Gujarat had resigned and the state assembly stood dissolved. The movement was called Navnirman.
Bihar followed within months. A seventy-one-year-old freedom fighter was invited to lead a students’ agitation and renamed it Sampoorna Kranti, total revolution. The Emergency was declared on 25 June 1975. The government that came out of that movement in 1977 had collapsed by 1979. The students who led the agitation stayed. Within a decade they were chief ministers, deputy chief ministers and union ministers, and they held office for the next forty years. The movement produced a governing class. Bihar is still arguing about what else it produced.
The pattern travels. In France, the events of May 1968 began at Nanterre in a dispute over dormitory visiting rules. Weeks later, in the June elections, the government those students had marched against won the first absolute parliamentary majority in the history of the French Republic. They had been the most visible young people in Europe and the ballot went the other way.
In Assam, a students’ union agitated for six years, signed an accord in August 1985, formed itself into a political organisation and took power four months later. In Bangladesh in 2024, a student movement over job quotas ended with a Prime Minister on a helicopter and, by the United Nations’ estimate, as many as fourteen hundred people dead in three weeks.
Hold that history and look at this July.
The demonstrations began at Jantar Mantar in early June with students. By the third week of July they were being organised under the banners of established student federations in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Thrissur, Chennai, Mumbai, Lucknow and Jaipur. In Chennai, when the police refused permission for a public rally, the sit-in moved inside an office belonging to an organised political formation. In Mumbai, a gathering at Shivaji Park was addressed by a senior political leader. Marches and rallies were being called by adults with permanent addresses and legal teams.
The students were used by nobody. That version is lazy and it insults them.
What happened to them is closer to physics.
A movement of eighteen-year-olds owns no organisation, no treasury, no lawyers and no continuity. The cohort graduates. Within two years, nobody who stood there at the start is still standing there. So it borrows all four things from whoever offers them, and whoever offers them acquires a share of what happens next. This is arithmetic. It happened to the students of Ahmedabad in 1974 and to the students of Dhaka in 2024, and there is no reason for India in 2026 to be the exception.
Which brings me to the question I actually want in front of you.
Your child walked into a fifty-year-old pattern carrying a two-year-old grievance. Something at home made that trade look worth it.
The number nobody quotes
The National Crime Records Bureau publishes an annual volume called Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India. It reads like a ledger, because that is what it is.
The 2024 edition, released in May this year, recorded 14,488 student deaths by suicide. It is the highest figure in the history of the series and it is 8.5 per cent of all suicide deaths in the country. In 2014 the number stood at 8,068. Across those eleven years the total comes to 1,23,918.
Every one of those eleven years, India held a public argument about examinations.
Here is the part that stays out of the argument.
The NCRB sorts these deaths by recorded cause. Among children below the age of eighteen, failure in examination was the recorded cause in 1,071 cases.
Family problems accounted for 3,101.
Nearly three times as many. The category this country has organised its entire outrage around is the smaller of the two.
Then the number I would ask you to sit with longest.
Kota is the coaching capital of India. Two lakh children arrive there every year to prepare for exactly these examinations. It is the city we point to whenever we want to talk about examination pressure. At least twenty-nine children died by suicide there in 2023.
In the 2024 NCRB data, Kota recorded 17 deaths attributed to failure in examination.
It recorded 95 attributed to family problems.
Five and a half times as many. In the coaching capital of India.
A police classification is a blunt instrument, and “family problems” is a bucket holding a hundred different things, most of them nothing to do with parenting. Illness. Debt. Violence. A marriage coming apart. A father who lost work. This statistic convicts nobody.
It does point somewhere, and it has been pointing there for eleven years. The country has been shouting at the National Testing Agency. The country’s own data has been quietly indicating the dining table.
The children who improved before anyone treated them
There is a physician in the United States named Zach Bush. He is board-certified three times over, in internal medicine, in endocrinology and metabolism, and in hospice and palliative medicine. He spent his early career designing chemotherapy at the University of Virginia and left academic medicine in 2010. His book, Human: From Crisis to a Regenerative Future, came out with Hay House.
What he did after leaving is the part that matters here.
He opened a clinic in rural Virginia. Into that clinic came a stream of children on the autism spectrum, many of them severely affected, many undiagnosed, most of them in visible distress. Head-banging. Self-harm. Behaviour that families had stopped describing to anyone outside the house because of what came back when they did.
The children could not be treated. That is the plain clinical fact he ran into. A child in that degree of distress cannot sit in a room with a stranger and be examined, let alone be given a course of anything. There was no door in.
So the clinic began treating the mothers.
He treated them because they were the patients in front of him and they were breaking. Years without a full night’s sleep. Careers gone. Marriages under strain. A social world that had quietly closed. Bodies carrying a level of sustained stress that would be treated as a medical emergency in any other patient.
Over the following two years he observed something he had not gone looking for.
The children improved before they had received any treatment themselves.
They improved when their mothers were treated. And as the clinic widened its care to grandmothers, to aunts, to uncles, the children improved further. Nobody had touched the child.
His reading of it is that these children were functioning as receivers of extraordinary sensitivity, and that a great deal of what the family had understood as the child’s condition was the child expressing the emotional state of the household around him.
That is one physician’s observation, across two years, in one practice. He offers it as exactly that.
Here is the controlled trial that runs alongside it.
In 2006, Myrna Weissman and colleagues published the STAR*D-Child study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They took mothers with major depression who were being treated with medication. Separately, they assessed those mothers’ children. The children received no treatment at all. They were assessed by evaluators who were kept unaware of how the mothers were responding.
When the mothers’ depression went into remission, the children’s psychiatric symptoms improved.
A follow-up published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2011 tracked the same families for a further year. Children of mothers who remitted early improved on every outcome measured. Children of mothers whose depression did not lift got worse over the same period.
The children in that trial were treated by exactly the same method. Somebody looked after their mother.
One physician in a rural clinic and one team running a multi-centre trial inside the American psychiatric system arrived at the same finding from opposite directions. The child carries the state of the adult standing nearest to him. The fastest route to the child runs through that adult.
The mechanism, in saliva
You can watch this happen in a laboratory.
Cortisol is the hormone the body releases to mobilise against a threat. It is measurable in saliva. Researchers can therefore take samples from a mother and her adolescent child, several times a day, in their own home, across several days, and watch what the two curves do relative to each other.
They move together.
A 2009 study of mothers and adolescents in natural settings found significant covariation between the two cortisol curves inside the same family. The synchrony ran stronger in families that spent more time together. It intensified in the moments when either the mother’s mood or the adolescent’s mood had darkened.
Read that slowly. A child living in your house runs your stress. It arrives in him as chemistry, on the same curve, at the same hours. The nervous system of an adolescent is still under construction, and it builds itself against the nervous system standing nearest to it. This is a chemical measured in the boy’s own saliva at seven in the evening.
Which is also why the finding above is the most hopeful thing in this essay.
The most powerful intervention available to a struggling seventeen-year-old is an adult in that house who has stopped struggling alone.
You are the leverage.
The cell that stopped talking
Bush’s original work was in cancer, and the sentence he keeps returning to comes from what he saw under the microscope at Virginia.
“Cancer cells are the most isolated, damaged, and fragile cells in the human body.”
His argument is that a cancer cell has lost communication with the cells around it, and that what it needs is that communication restored.
The peer-reviewed literature has been circling the same territory for fifty years.
Cells speak to each other through structures called gap junctions, built from proteins called connexins. Small molecules pass directly from the inside of one cell into the inside of the next. It is the physical channel through which a cell knows it belongs to a tissue.
Loss of connexins and gap junctions is a documented feature of carcinogenesis. When researchers restore connexin expression in cancer cells, the cancer phenotype reverses, the cells differentiate again, and growth comes back under regulation. In advanced disease the picture grows more complicated, and some tumours switch connexins back on to assist their own spread. Biology rarely delivers a clean parable.
The first part holds, and the first part is enough.
A cell that stops exchanging signals with the cells around it stops behaving like part of a body. It begins behaving like something with its own agenda. It divides fast, because a cell that cannot hear the whole has lost the signal that tells it when to stop.
Six thousand years before the microscope, this tradition had already named the condition. It called the six internal enemies the shadripus, and it held that isolation from the whole is the ground on which they grow. It built satsang, the company of others in the same practice, and treated it as a condition for individual sadhana.
The Indian household was the first satsang. Three generations, one kitchen, arguments in the courtyard, nobody eating alone. This is Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam at the scale a person actually lives in.
Count the meals in your week where your son sits in a room with another human being and neither of you is holding a phone.
Why he chose that one
Come back to the list at the top of this essay.
Look at what a seventeen-year-old is actually able to protest.
His father’s job has no gate to stand outside. The comparison to his cousin comes from someone who loves him and would be wounded, and he knows it. The silence that followed his January marks was weather, and a placard can only hold an event. His mother has gone four years without proper sleep, and he has no words for that, and neither do most adults.
Each of those is nameless. Each lacks a minister, an address, a crowd.
The paper leak has all four.
It is the single grievance in that boy’s life that arrives with a villain, a location, a slogan and ten thousand other people who feel it in the same week. It is the only container on offer, so it takes the whole load. All twenty things go into the one thing.
This is why the size of these protests has surprised so many commentators. They keep measuring the anger against the size of the cause and finding a mismatch. The cause is legitimate and the anger is much older than the cause.
The protest is the only door in the building, so it carries everything.
That is what should occupy you as a parent. Your child had exactly one place to put six years of accumulated pressure, and it was a road in another part of the city, standing beside people whose interests run alongside his for one season.
A boy with four doors in his life has no need to break down one.
What a parent can do this week
Four small things. All of them boring. That is the point.
First, ask him one question this week that has nothing to do with the exam, and then wait through the silence that follows. The silence will run long, because he will be checking whether the question is a trap. Let it run. The waiting is the whole message.
Second, look at your own morning. Yours, before his. The first twenty minutes of your day set the physiology he wakes into and synchronises with before either of you has spoken a word. The cortisol study is about you.
Third, eat one meal a day in the same room, with the phones in another room. Proximity is enough on its own. The gap junction asks only for contact.
Fourth, leave the anger where it is. It is legitimate and it belongs to him. Your work is to see that it has more than one place to go.
A little, daily, is how a nervous system is re-architected. Drop by drop on parched earth. This one moves at the speed of months.
What happens next
The Education Minister has resigned. The fast-track courts have been announced. There will be a re-examination, and a committee, and in eighteen months a report that a few hundred people read.
The organisations that arrived at Jantar Mantar in July will still be standing in 2029, holding a new grievance by then, because that is their work and they are good at it. The boy on Parliament Street will have moved on. He will be twenty-one, in a college he did not choose, in a city his parents picked, carrying every one of the twenty things he could not protest, and one more on top.
Something in the room he goes home to decides which of those two facts matters more.
The system failed him. That is documented, and it earned every bit of the anger it received.
It was never the thing that held him. The households of this country will outlive every government that has ever governed them, and the health of India gets decided at about eight in the evening, in a kitchen, in the difference between a mother who is depleted and a mother who is not.
He chose the paper leak because it was the only door in his life that opened.
Build him a house with more doors, and he will never have to stand outside a gate to be heard.
The only miracle in the world is you standing on your own two feet.
Hari Om Tat Sat.
Arjun is a practitioner in the Bihar School of Yoga tradition under Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati. He founded OMJOOMSUH in 2022 as a for-profit wellness platform rooted in the Vedic sciences.
Related
Shadripus · Sadhana · Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam · Vagus Nerve · Bihar School of Yoga · Before The World Claims You · Your Morning Belongs To You · The Three 3.0s · Upstream of the Lab Report · He Smiled Between Two Armies
Sources
- Al Jazeera, “Indian student protests: What’s next after Modi’s promise on exam leaks?”, 24 July 2026.
- The Federal, “NEET protests: Delhi lit the spark, and small towns, cities are keeping it burning”, 22 July 2026.
- NCRB, Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India 2024; reported in The Wire, 11 May 2026.
- The Wire, “Over 1.23 Lakh Students Died by Suicide From 2014-2024”.
- The Quint, on Kota student deaths.
- Papp, Pendry & Adam, “Mother-adolescent physiological synchrony in naturalistic settings”, 2009.
- Weissman et al., “Remissions in Maternal Depression and Child Psychopathology: A STAR*D-Child Report”, JAMA 2006;295(12):1389-98.
- Wickramaratne et al., “Children of Depressed Mothers 1 Year After Remission of Maternal Depression”, American Journal of Psychiatry, 2011.
- Zach Bush MD, “Cancer”.
- Aasen et al., “Gap junctions and cancer: communicating for 50 years”, Nature Reviews Cancer, 2016.
- “Gap Junction Intercellular Communication in the Carcinogenesis Hallmarks”.