‘Zara laathi dheere chalana’: How classic and new-age poetry powered the Gen Z Cockroach protests

Re police sipahi laathi waale, kya ghar ja kar tu roya kal? Re saansad meri sansad waale, kya ghar ja kar so paaya kal?(O policeman with the baton, did you go home and weep yesterday? O Member of Parliament, my representative, did you go home and sleep peacefully yesterday?)“A poem… begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong,” wrote American poet Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, co-founder of the influential literary magazine The Seven Arts, in 1916.More than a century later, that “sense of wrong” found expression in the verses that emerged around the youth-led Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) protests. As videos of police lathi-charges and tear gas fired at students circulated online, poets, artists and actors took to social media and protest grounds to articulate the anger and anguish