This year, I spent March 8, yaniki International Working Women’s Day in Trivandrum, at a meeting of the Kerala Asha Health Workers Association (KAHWA), who have been on strike in front of the State Secretariat for over a month.

The sun was strong, the street busy with traffic, the secretariat white and inscrutable in the heat. A steady stream of people joined—representatives of the United Nurses Association, Dalit Human Rights Movement, tea plantation workers and fishers, academics, students, volunteers. Someone said they would sing a song. In the compressed quiet of hundreds of people, an old Hindi film song in a sole voice, “Mere naina sawan bhadon, phir bhi mera mann pyasa”. An unexpected song at a protest. Yet so apt, so powerfully affecting, so true to the political emotion of that moment.