There is a popular belief, useful chiefly for its neatness, that the cockroach would outlive a nuclear winter, walking out from under the rubble of grander and more fragile creatures because its biology asks so little of the world that even a ruined one will do. Sonam Wangchuk continued his hospitalised fast through the same day, offering to end it the moment Parliament merely agreed to discuss the education system that had produced the protest in the first place, a modest enough condition beside the machinery assembled to keep a few thousand students away from the building where that discussion was supposed to happen anyway. A state that finds a hunger strike easier to ignore than a march finds louder is a state that has confused audibility with legitimacy, and the confusion does not reflect well on either the audibility or the legitimacy. What survives an extermination attempt tends to be whatever the extermination attempt was least prepared to understand, and a protest organised by young people around an examination system that has repeatedly failed them was never going to be talked out of existence by a curfew on data or a line of barricades. Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com