New Delhi, July 16 -- In every South Asian home, a mother keeps the lights on a little longer so her child can finish one more chapter, and that quiet sacrifice is now marching in the streets. There is a particular kind of exhaustion settling over South Asia's young people. And it does not look like apathy. It looks like fire on the streets of Kathmandu, cockroach masks on the pavements of Delhi, and students wading waist-deep through flood water in Cumilla, Bangladesh to sit an exam nobody thought to postpone.

Even as I write this, from Dhaka to Kathmandu to Karachi, the region's most literate, most connected, most qualified generation is also its angriest. The question worth asking is not whether that anger is justified. It plainly is....