By now you have probably seen the clip. A young woman, stuck for five hours at a check post near Minimarg in Dras, loses her patience and lets the personnel have it. “We are Gen Z, we won’t tolerate this,” she says, before turning to the crowd and telling them to get in their cars and leave. It went viral within hours. The “we are Gen Z” line became the headline, the punchline, and — after Chief Minister Omar Abdullah weighed in — the entire conversation.
And that is unfair, because the phrasing is the least interesting thing about that video.
Let’s be fair about the facts first. The road she was blocked on — the Zoji La–Sonamarg stretch — was shut for weather and safety, and that is not a conspiracy. A team holding travellers back from a mountain pass in bad conditions is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. If there is one thing the clip gets wrong, it is the target: the constable at the barrier did not create the problem, and shouting at him was never going to fix it.
But strip away one clumsy sentence and look at what she was actually angry about, and it becomes a lot harder to laugh off. Five hours. No information. No estimate. Nobody willing to say what was happening or when it would end. That is not entitlement — that is what it feels like to be treated as someone who does not need to be told anything. Anyone who has waited, and waited, with zero communication knows the exact feeling.
Somewhere in the middle of it, she also voiced a broader frustration — that long, unexplained waits on these roads are becoming routine, and that travellers are increasingly expected to simply absorb them. She made the point almost in passing, and the moment moved on.
And that passing point is really the heart of it. Being stopped for bad weather is fair enough; nobody sensible argues with a shut mountain pass. What wears people down is the silence around it — no information, no estimate, no sense that anyone owes them an explanation. That is a frustration any traveller, anywhere in the country, will recognise instantly.
Which brings us to the question worth actually asking — the one buried under all the “Gen Z” noise. Why is there such a gap between how the state moves VIPs and how it moves everyone else? Why can a convoy get a road cleared in minutes while a family sits for hours with nobody telling them anything? The complaint was never really about one closure on one bad-weather day. It is about who gets told, who gets waved through, and who is simply expected to wait and adjust.
Omar Abdullah’s point — that “we are Gen Z” is turning into a new version of “jaante nahi ho mere baap kaun hai” — is a clever line, and it will get plenty of applause. But it also does something convenient: it turns a real question about accountability into a joke about one young woman’s choice of words. The easiest way to avoid answering “why were we kept in the dark for five hours” is to spend the day laughing at how she asked it.
Here is the more generous, and frankly more accurate, reading. This generation’s instinct was never “do you know who I am.” It is a refusal to accept opacity as normal — to keep asking why nobody explained, why the rules seem to bend for some and not others, why “adjust ho jaayega” is always addressed to the ordinary citizen and never to the VIP. That instinct is not a threat to anyone. It is the beginning of a fair question.
She could have said it better. Most people, five hours in and freezing, don’t. But the substance deserves an answer, not a punchline — because plenty of people wait far longer, and far more quietly, without ever making it to anyone’s timeline.