I showed up at a sparsely attended anti-war protest on my campus today, but only managed to stay an hour before I gave up. I'm not sure whether it was the unexpected heat, the decidedly un-riled-up-crowd, or the post-proposal-defense paperwork I had waiting for me, but I just didn't have the attention span to listen to another well-spoken, courageous professor rant brilliantly about America's absurd foreign policy and conservative campus insanity. I found it particularly discouraging to compare the small group of us huddled around the speakers' podium to what seemed like endless amounts of students haphazardly strewn across the lawns. Although I'm not convinced that protesting is always the most effective form of activism (yes, I know, sometimes it is, I'll give you that), I'm completely convinced that educating oneself is necessary for responsible citizenship.

Perhaps because I'm an educator, I've long been fascinated with the question of why people get involved in resistance movements (which is why I found Rehana, a certain deshi character in a certain 'Deshi book, fascinating). How high do the stakes have to be? Who has to be affected? If middle class kids hadn't been drafted in Vietnam, would there have been a national protest movement? If mainstream media had devoted their attention to the Black Panthers instead of Martin Luther King Jr., would privileged kids have become freedom riders? How could Bhagat Singh and Mahatma Gandhi, men with similar missions and radically different ideas about how India (which then also included modern Pakistan and Bangladesh) should overthrow the Raj, both inspire so much loyalty and passion? What kinds of issues and leaders make people care deeply enough to take action, and what kinds of issues and leaders fail to do so? What would've turned the protest I went to from crowdless to crowded?

Interestingly, after coming back from the protest, I ran across this article on the BBC from over a week ago. I'm not sure how I missed it during my usual daily prowl across the site, but to be honest, it didn't do much except leave me wanting more information. Basically, the article says that Afghan TV stations are refusing to uphold a government ban on India soap operas. After all, you know how those Indians can be. Very very bad, those Bollywood types. Always stirring up trouble with their licentious ways.

Even though the article provides pretty much no ideals on the consequences this TV station faced, the outcome of their protest, the history of censorship in Afghanistan, or the feelings of the Afghani people, I was still impressed. After all, the Afghan government is no joke. (Of course, we're not blameless in the political situation over there either, i.e., protest I went to this morning.) To have a little bitty TV station (although, for all I know, it could be a powerful TV station) standing up to a great big abusive government is pretty impressive.

And the kicker: what were they standing up for? Serials. I am Indian, and I love my culture, but most of my experiences with serials involve dueling with my grandmother to see who can make the snarkiest remark about the characters or the plot of whatever we happen to be watching. (It's extra fun because in our verbal sparring matches, Tamil and English are both viable weapons.) My grandmother is pretty badass - she organized midwives into union-like entities in South India back in the thirties, before India was even Raj-free. I can't imagine her sticking her neck out to a scary, scary government to watch her (favorite) afternoon lineup. Then again, I can't imagine her in Afghanistan - nor do I want to.

The government is banning these serials because apparently they're un-Islamic. Apparently they're also important enough to warrant full scale, in-your-face, internationally-reported-on, defiance.

People dying in Afghanistan, on the other hand? Yeah, not so much - at least on my campus.

But full disclosure here. It's easy to scoff at the apathy of others. It's easy to scoff at the (perhaps misplaced / disporportionate) rage of others (about things that seem ridiculous to us). But completely honestly, I'm not exactly a paragon of protest-attendance myself, nor do I have any room to stand on the moral high ground here. In fact, I felt kind of guilty about how little I've done, especially after today. So maybe my question isn't just what makes people care, and why. Maybe it's actually what makes people like ME care...and why.