India, Oct. 11 -- Otpor was a Serbian youth movement that used civil resistance to help overthrow Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic on October 5, 2000.

Look closely at the fallen governments of the last seven decades, Tehran in 1953, Belgrade in 2000, Tbilisi in 2003, Kyiv in 2004, Cairo in 2011, and then, nearer, closer, almost at the doorstep, Colombo, Dhaka, Kathmandu. Stare long enough and what first looks like noise, crowds, smoke, fire, a palace emptied overnight, begins to crystallise- resolve repeat into something more sinister and unsettling: an exemplar, a sequence of moves replicated so faithfully across languages, continents and decades that it stops resembling history and starts resembling a recipe, annotated, translated...