Abhijeet Dipke
@abhijeet_dipke
What if all cockroaches come together?
Something big is happening in India right now.
After 12 years of Modi’s rule, a new generation of Indians took to the streets to challenge their own government. And it all started with a joke.
“There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment and don’t have any place in the profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, some of them become RTI activists, some of them become other activists, and they start attacking everyone.”
21 young people had killed themselves.
A Chief Justice had compared young people to cockroaches.
And then came a single six-word tweet that changed everything.
Sitting in his Boston apartment, Abhijeet Dipke made a satirical page calling upon the lazy, unemployed and chronically online to come together. In 24 hours, the page got a million followers. A month later, tens of thousands of young people were on the streets.
Now, something way bigger is unfolding and we have direct access to the people at the center of it all.
A film starring
AbhijeetDipke
The Accidental Leader
Boston University PR graduate. Former Aam Aadmi Party political comms strategist. Self-described introvert and in student debt. From Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. Ambedkarite. Returned from Boston to lead a movement he never expected to start.
“I decided I need to go back to my country to show I’m not a national security threat. I love my country, just not in the way that you [the government] want.”
SauravDas
The Legal Mind
Delhi-based investigative journalist. RTI activist since 18. Co-founder of Climate Action Front. Led Delhi’s 2025 air pollution protests. Now one of the movement’s key voices.
“This is historic because in the past 12 years, nothing of this sort has happened. There was an atmosphere of fear that was created, fear around Modi also. All of this is gone now. It’s almost as though the universe opened a door for India through its young.”
AshutoshRanka
The Suit Who Got His Hands Dirty
IIT Kanpur and London School of Economics graduate. Former McKinsey consultant and national treasurer for the Aam Aadmi Party. Left the corporate world to get directly involved in public movements and grassroots democracy efforts.
“We definitely do have political ambitions when it means, you know, to transform the way politics is happening in the country right now.”
NehaBora
Fiery Student Leader
PhD student at JNU. National President of the All India Students’ Association. Spent 23 days on hunger strike for the student protests. Daughter of an Indian Army officer. Her father no longer speaks to her over her involvement in leftist politics.
“It is, in fact, about young people coming up and saying that we are united in reckoning with an education system that has failed us for years on end now.”
RatnaSingh
The Constitutional Voice
Law graduate and former legal journalist. Left journalism to pursue litigation before joining the movement, where she became its legal affairs head and spokesperson.
“We are also just done with divide and rule politics on the basis of religion. Political parties need to understand that what used to work for a certain mindset of people – it won’t work with the youth.”
The story is getting bigger…
We started shooting just as the protests were winding down.
But the more we filmed, the more we realized something bigger was happening. This movement is crossing political, social, and geographic lines, building unlikely coalitions and taking a different vision of politics to some of the most remote parts of India.
What began online as only a joke has become something much more serious. As documentarians of this historic moment, we are going to be there every step of the way.
Because from everything we’ve captured so far: this story has just started and it is only getting bigger.
It started out funny.It started out ridiculous.It is deadly serious now.
The filmmakers
Khushboo Ranka is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer, and a recipient of the Peabody Award for While We Watched, which she produced. She is currently a Shorenstein Documentary in the Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. She directed An Insignificant Man, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and her films have screened at leading international festivals including Toronto, Busan, IDFA and Hot Docs. She also produced the Kickstarter-funded democracy boardgame Shasn. She has been a Berlinale and Charles Wallace Fellow. Her work explores politics, democracy, media and contemporary India.
Kulsoom Rizavi is an emerging documentary filmmaker. She was a Melinda Gates-funded scholar at Duke University and is currently an MFA candidate at Northwestern. Her work spans film, interactive media and artist books, including one on accent-based discrimination now held in Duke’s Rubenstein Library. Her short documentary A Funeral for Ice was distributed globally for the United Nations’ International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, and she has directed commercial work for brands including Notion. She is a Humanity in Action Fellow and an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar. Her practice explores the issues shaping her generation: climate change, automation and authoritarianism.
Arvind Singh is a Delhi-based cinematographer who documented the movement at Jantar Mantar from Day 1. His short-form coverage reached tens of millions of views, and his reporting from the initial protests earned him a byline in The New York Times.
Our ask for you: $100,000.
We are currently in early development. This is a crucial stage. $100,000 allows us to keep filming for the next 3 months, developing pitch materials and allowing us to raise more money.
Contributions of $25,000 or more include a Co-Producer credit.
We have a fiscal sponsor and all donations are tax-deductible.