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A Tea With Rohit :

Of Institutional Violence and the Theft of an Ordinary Conversation

 ✍🏽Aishwarya Prakash

January 2016, Banaras Hindu University
This was the first time I heard Rohit Vemula’s name. Tossed in newspaper headlines, taken carelessly in parliamentary debates, and becoming a rallying point for demanding change in the country.

At the time, I was a BA second-year student at Banaras Hindu University. Rohit was a research scholar at the University of Hyderabad. In my imagination, the distance between us felt enormous. Not just geographical, but existential.

To my twenty-year-old self, being a twenty-six-year-old research scholar seemed impossibly mature. My only interaction with such scholars was through teaching assistants who took some of our classes, and who felt like grown-ups who had life figured out and answers to almost everything. So, with this as my only reference point, I imagined Rohit to be the same — a grown-up with “serious grown-up problems,” beyond my emotional or intellectual understanding.

I read the letter he wrote before his death and was deeply moved. But in my youthful naïveté, I do not think I grasped its full depth. In my mind, Rohit became a philosopher. Someone who had understood life, found it unbearably disappointing, and chosen death with clarity and intention.

In my imagination, he was a grown-up and I was a child. I believed that when I reached his age, I would surely understand what he must have been going through. Some very complex problems perhaps which were beyond anyone’s help. And so, for this young, naïve savarna woman, enthusiastic about rallying for social justice, but far removed and insulated from the repercussions of resistance, he became just a name. A name that I, and many others like me, vowed never to forget in our protests, seminars, and conversations of commitment to social justice.

October 2023, Hyderabad

Nearly eight years later, in 2023 I visited the University of Hyderabad for an academic conference. I too was a research scholar now, funded with a UGC fellowship just like Rohit.

Friends who had spent some years at HCU had told me about its forests, lakes, and rock formations. I was eager to walk the campus, to finally see for myself the place that had lived in my imagination for so long.

Early morning on my very first day there, while the campus was still quiet, I started my stroll. I came across a small canteen and stopped for tea. I ordered lemon tea and was pleasantly surprised to receive it with basil seeds and mint leaves, all without asking! I remember thinking, half-joking to myself, how tragic my life was that my own university canteen tea could never compare.

I sat down on a nearby bench, cup in hand, finally ready to take in the calm morning.

And that is when I saw him.

A bust of Rohit Vemula, smiling serenely at me.

For a moment, I couldn’t process what I was seeing. I had been thinking about Rohit since I arrived on campus, but I did not know there was a sculpture of him there. The suddenness of his presence, the familiarity of his face in an unexpected place, triggered something overwhelming. For a moment, it felt like meeting someone deeply familiar in an unexpected new place.
There he was - immortalised in stone at twenty-six, and there I was sitting beside him, with two years more of life experiences that he never got to have.

In that instant, memories rushed back: the first time I heard of his death, the slogans, the posters, the speeches, the promises to remember. And suddenly, the absurdity of it all, hit me with crushing force.

When I first encountered Rohit through his writing, I was only twenty. He was a grown man in my imagination. But now, when I was twenty-eight, an age Rohit would never reach, I think I could for the first time see him for who he was, and not only for who I had imagined him to be. Someone who had not really set out to be another name, sacrificed on the quest for social justice. Someone more than the last letter he wrote. Someone perhaps who was just another youngster still figuring his way, and not the adult I had believed him to be in my naivety. Only because I had read one piece of his writing, I like countless others thought that I knew Rohit. But here was the harsh truth. I did not know Rohit. And I never would.

And so, I decided to sit there, and do the only thing I now could: have a quiet cup of tea with Rohit.

The Theft of the Ordinary

As I sat there, I imagined what it would be like if I had met the actual Rohit there, instead of his bust. He would have been a young man of thirty-three then. Perhaps an accomplished physicist, with many peer-reviewed publications, pursuing a post-doctorate, present at HCU that day as an alumnus visiting his old institution. Or maybe a political activist, working at the grassroots, there on campus that day to meet up with fellow comrades. Or maybe he would be both, or maybe neither of these things, and be someone else altogether. How are we to know?

Would he have smiled at me and acknowledged my presence? Would we have shared a conversation over this hot cup of tea and maybe found some mutual friends, our eyes lighting up in an instant of having found common connections? We would have perhaps soon wandered off on our own paths, going about our day. Would we even remember each other’s names after this brief conversation? Both his and mine are perfectly ordinary names after all!

So many questions in my mind, and yet no answers. Rohit was there right beside me and yet, he just wouldn’t talk. And in that moment my heart broke from having been denied the possibility of this one ordinary conversation.

We often speak of the loss of the exceptional when we talk about deaths like Rohit’s. Of brilliance cut short, of promise unfulfilled. But equally violent, and far less acknowledged, is the theft of the ordinary. The loss of conversations that would have been unremarkable. Conversations spent weaving dreams of a future while discussing the mundane present, or simply sitting in silence over tea.

These small, soft pleasures of life. The right to be banal, frustrated, hopeful, confused, and alive. Oh, so alive. These are not luxuries. These are experiences that everyone is owed simply by virtue of being.

What institutional violence steals, like that inflicted on Rohit, is not only futures or recognition, but also this very ordinariness. The joys that were taken away from him, and from all those who knew him and who could have known him in the future.

At twenty-eight, I finally understood the twenty-six-year-old Rohit in ways my twenty-year-old self never could. Rohit was perhaps like any other twenty-six-year-old, and likely understood the world no better and no worse than them. He was extraordinary for having battled his way through an unfair world to obtain a seat in one of the best institutions in our country. And yet, I am very sure that like other twenty-six-year-olds, he too had many extremely ordinary dreams.

Most research scholars our age worry about friendships, relationships, money, supervisors, deadlines. We complain about stipends, crack poor jokes that only we find funny, and struggle to hold our lives together. Some of us also worry about society. About injustice, about the country and the world we live in. We read, we write, we agitate, we get angry and often impatient.

If all goes well, we find a place in academia, research, or teaching. We contribute knowledge, mentor others, and build lives.

This is the trajectory every young scholar in this country deserves.
This is the trajectory I am walking today.
This is the trajectory Rohit too was walking, and exceptionally well.

So why did his path end the way it did? And why does it continue to end this way for so many others who share his caste and social location? Why have we made the most banal existences of life into privileges that we do not allow everyone to have?

Of Institutional Apathy

Our institutions pride themselves on merit while being devoid of empathy.

We have turned suffering into an agni pariksha, insisting that hardship is necessary to prove worth. But we quietly hand out invisible protective cloaks, of caste, class, and gender privilege, to some students. These cloaks allow them to pass through the fire unscathed, while others burn, scream, and break, as we nod along approvingly and say, “Life is supposed to be hard.” We repeat sternly that only gold survives fire.

Very few make it through the fire. And even the ones who do are burnt through. Forced to go through life feeling broken and wondering what is wrong with them, watching their peers strut about basking in the glory of their achievements, even as they are tired solely from the effort of surviving.

My twenty-year-old self, when she heard of Rohit’s death, imagined that he must have been facing very complicated problems. Problems difficult to solve, problems that compelled him to take this drastic step. But that day, sitting beside Rohit’s bust, I knew this was not true.

Rohit had very solvable problems. He was facing issues accessing his stipends. He had been rusticated from his hostel on so-called disciplinary grounds. He was being treated with apathy and unfairness. These are not complex problems. These are problems institutions can solve within a day if they are willing. And yet they didn’t.

If anyone had tried, even a little, Rohit could have been standing next to me in person instead of in stone. But it was not to be.

Institutions will watch students stumble, struggling to find their way through complex labyrinths that refuse to be welcoming, and yet will not raise a finger to help those who are drowning. All in the name of merit, neutrality, and fairness. And will never call it what it is: cruelty.

We need to ask harder questions of our institutions.

Why are we not protecting our students better?
Why, even after everything, are we still stopping at half-heartedly made and rarely implemented anti-discrimination laws instead of building active systems of support?
How long will we pretend that the fire is equal for all?
And for God’s sake, why is there a fire in the first place?

We need institutions grounded in warm empathy, not cold distance or burning tests. We need safety nets, accountability, and care.

Rohit was not just a name. Not just a symbol. He was a promising young man, who the society refused to lend a hand, even as he was visibly sinking for no fault of his own, in a quick sand which was of the society’s own making. Rohit did not choose this. No one ever chooses this. If he had a choice, as he wrote, he would have chosen to be a writer of science, like Carl Sagan. But again, like he said, all he could write was that letter.

What happened to Rohit was institutional murder. To call it anything else is to erase the brutality of the conditions that made it inevitable.

Our collective memory likes to remember Rohit as a symbol. But did he want to be one? We could not give Rohit even an ordinary life, so we try to compensate for this with an extraordinary death. But this will not suffice.

We owe him justice.
And we owe future students a world where this never happens again.

A Road to Irrelevance  

 ✍🏽J. Hamid , 30 Dec 2025

We look to a world,

To understand it in its entirety we try,

Notwithstanding our hesitation with cold precision we speak,

Certainty in human actions we seek,

Platonic forms we use to expel doubt,

Build wall of mathematics and jargon to keep the uninitiated out,

We showed ourselves and the society tinted mirrors and obfuscating mists,

Our hubris a function of all that we missed,

We seemingly understood elegance came at a cost,

Yet absent are the particularities of human existence that affect it the most,

A weapon and justification we became,

Adding consequences austerity inequality global capital and climate change to our name,

The orthodoxy kept it's vigil,

While those on the epistemic margins fought

To reclaim and remind what we were before,

Those who still remember,

Probably some long shelved heterodox ember,

Of what we were supposed to be,

Until our Ignorance and Certainty brought us and the society to grief,

To speak with ourselves we mastered,

With the masses whom we explained we forgot,

Our solutions to issues kept us interested,

Of our solutions the world outside knew not,

Empirics and theory sans polemic,

Our theories twisted with our consent by the charlatan's rhetoric,

Theorize explain and understand we long have,

Attempt to change we seldom have,

Represent advocate and empower we shall,

Our assumed neutrality we discard our duty we fulfill

Seeing and Being  

(on positionality)

 ✍🏽Aishwarya Prakash

I see you,

You see me.

If it ended here, it would all be well 

And what I saw, to the whole world I’d tell.

But if only it were as simple as this,

Many of life’s nuances we would not miss.

Because it’s not just that I see you,

Or that

You see me 

But also,

You see me seeing you,

And I see you seeing me.

And in the middle of all this,

How we think we are seen

Changes our being.

And the question remains 

How can two people ever see the same thing,

Or see anything at all?

Aren’t we all like the five blind men,

Each touching some part of the elephant 

One claiming it’s a tree trunk,

Another a rope,

A fan, or something more?

So unable to grasp it all,

The elephant remains unseen,

In the middle of all our seeing 

Even as each of us swears

That what we saw is what there is.

But if only we could learn to accept

That all our seeing

Is limited by our being 

Maybe,

We could all see

More than just what we saw.