New Delhi, July 25 -- What began as an ill-considered courtroom comment by the Chief Justice of India has blown up into a full-scale nationwide protest movement by the student community against the rot in India's education system. Although Chief Justice Surya Kant has clarified that his cockroach comment was only meant for lawyers with fake degrees, his original remark on May 15 that unemployed individuals become social media activists and attack the system like "cockroaches" and "parasites" touched a raw nerve and snowballed from a creative social media satire into a youth protest movement that the country had not seen in five decades.

That there is a generational chasm in thinking between Gen Z and the establishment generation was obvi...