The Cost Of Asking Why

- Imtiaz Ali, Jadavpur University

“I rebel, therefore I exist.” — Albert Camus

To ask why is no longer a question. It's an act of sedition.

From chalk-dusted classrooms to courtrooms draped in the national flag, authority demands

obedience, not understanding. It wants nodding heads, not raised fists. It doesn’t matter if you

wear a school uniform or a lawyer’s robe the moment you break from the script, you’re marked.

Troublemaker. Disturber of peace. Anti-national.

But peace for whom?

They’ll tell you rules exist to protect. But what they mean is: to protect themselves from you.

From your questions. From your inconvenient memory. From your refusal to forget the names

they’ve tried to erase.

In some parts of the country, asking why has put people behind bars for longer than crimes of

violence. No bullets, no bombs just a sentence spoken too clearly, a poem read too loud, a

Facebook post that refused to bend.

Authority, everywhere, fears imagination. The artist, the student, the dissenting voice they are

dangerous not because they carry weapons, but because they carry alternatives. And in a

country where conformity is patriotism, the mere act of thinking aloud can be treason.

The institution teaches you to shrink. It calls this maturity. But some of us were not made for

silence. Some of us were made for the echo.

The cost of asking why is high.

But the cost of not asking is far, far worse.