Last week, a fictional story about a teacher struggling to cope with online classes went viral. The writer, Ajoi Rajbanshi, developed an idea by Syed Mohammed Fahim and posted it on Facebook. A 55-year-old teacher, instructed by the principal to teach on Zoom, struggles financially as well as culturally to use this new medium. Capitalising on his uncertainty, students prank him, muting his audio, abusing him and disrupting the class. Humiliated, he breaks down, and is comforted by his young daughter. There is sentimentality and pathos in the storytelling and a lot of truth as well.

Post lockdown we have seen many videos of online classes gone wrong. Some were benign, pure comedy of Zoom confusion. Now, the genre has begun to harden: students mocking teachers, locking them out of the class, making rude comments about their personal lives. Sometimes these "online roast of teacher" videos are enacted, not with an aim to critique the violence of students, but take pleasure in the humiliation of teachers. Popular comics do sketches or compile such videos, adding laugh tracks and commentary, about how you have to be a severe boomer if you wear your headphones thus, or place your device wrongly. People who once made fun of people's inability to speak cool English, now mock their lack of fluency with technology. Framed as challenging age or authority figures, the underlying arrogance of class and caste vibrates at high voltage, but, theek hai, intersectionality is an English word, so I guess you don't need to apply it to people who speak other languages, hai na?