Generational Revolt Against Mediocrity
A scene from the protest site In Maxim Gorky’s 1901 play, The Petty Bourgeois , the Russian middle class is portrayed as timid, stagnant, and incapable of leading change. His characters symbolise three responses to social crisis. Pyotr represents bourgeois mediocrity, Nil working-class vitality, and Teterev intellectual cynicism. Today, in Delhi, young students protesting corruption in the academic sector echo this symbolic triangle, but with a distinctly Indian twist. Pyotr is the typical “petty bourgeois ” in the play. He is weak, indecisive, and fearful of change. Today, the supporters of Modi and his ideology belong to this category – of conservative middle-class people who form the majority of the population and are yet terrified of the minority and a lot of other things and hence require the putatively divine prop supplied gratuitously and eternally by religion and its excreta. Nil is a young worker with a lot of aspirations . He symbolises strength, independence, and...
