Every protest gets a word, and this one got leak. The question paper leaked. The archive is full of it: LEAK SARKAR on a painted board, a mocked-up film poster titled Ek Tha Leaker, a printed skeleton sitting at a desk captioned waiting for government exams that don't leak, a pair of placards over a barricade arguing that fixing one leak will not save a sinking ship. It is a plumbing word, and it had been doing plumbing work: something was supposed to be sealed and was not.
Then a few people took the word somewhere else.
NTA — the National Testing Agency, which sets and secures the paper. YOU. NEED. THIS. Four words, four colours, the lettering of a school project. And taped into the middle of the card, an actual unopened packet of sanitary pads, with the manufacturer's own promise about leaks printed across the front of it in the manufacturer's own typeface.
That is not a slogan. It is a transfer. The placard does not say the agency is like something that leaks; it hands the agency a product designed to stop leaking, and lets the packaging make the argument. And because the packet is real and unopened, somebody bought it, took it out of the bag, and taped it to a piece of card instead of using it. The object was spent on the joke.
In Hyderabad the same joke arrives printed. A drawn pad, clean vector lines, a red stripe down the middle of it. Even My Sanitary Pad Is Better Than NTA… and then, at the bottom in red, IT DOESN'T LEAK! Along the foot of the card, in small type, the name of whoever printed it: Telangana Women & Transgender Orgs JAC.
Look at what has happened between the two photographs. In Delhi it was improvised by somebody in a Florida beach T-shirt with a roll of tape. In Hyderabad a joint action committee of women's and transgender organisations had it typeset, printed and distributed at a sit-in, and put their name on it. The joke has been adopted. Somebody signed off on the proof.
Even My Sanitary Pad Is Better Than NTA… IT DOESN'T LEAK!
Both of those work because of shame. The reason NTA YOU NEED THIS lands at all is that a packet of pads, held up in public, at eye height, at a protest, is still supposed to be embarrassing — the shop still wraps it in newspaper. The placard borrows that embarrassment and posts it to an institution. It is a very efficient piece of construction: it makes the agency the one who should be blushing.
And then the third photograph, which is the reason for this album, and which is not a joke at all.
Two young women are sitting on a bedsheet spread over the pavement at the protest camp. In front of them, laid out in a row where anyone walking past can see them: packets of pads, several brands, some opened. Water bottles. A rolled-up poster nobody has used yet. Tied to the railing behind them, three hand-lettered signs — FREE PADS on the left, FREE PADS on the right, and between them, in pink, with a small drawn drop of blood and a heart: for LEAKS THAT ARE NATURAL & BEAUTIFUL.
This is a stall. Somebody worked out that a protest camp holding a pavement for weeks in the monsoon contains people who are menstruating and have nowhere to go, and dealt with it, and while dealing with it made a sign that takes the summer's word back one more time. Scandal, in paper leak. Insult, in NTA, you need this. And then, on a railing at Jantar Mantar, simply description: this happens, it is fine, take what you need.
The three of them together are a small argument about who gets to be embarrassed. An examination agency lost two and a half million people's paper and has not, in this archive, said anything about it. The sign on the railing is about a bodily function that half the country manages every month without comment. Only one of those two things was ever actually shameful, and the placards know exactly which.