### My Side of the Gen Z Protest I don't think I will ever forget September 8, 2025. It started like an ordinary workday. I had office that day, but I decided to work from home. Around 9 in the morning, I started hearing that a protest was happening around Maitighar. I opened the news, then another channel, then social media. The more I watched, the more I felt like I shouldn't just sit at home and watch it through a screen. I wanted to be there. After my stand-up meeting finished, I called my friend Pawan. He was already getting ready to go with his brother. He even had a One Piece flag with him, which had become one of the recognizable symbols people were carrying that day. I told him I wanted to come. Around noon, I took my lunch break from work and added another hour to it. Pawan came to my house and we headed towards Maitighar. On the way, we wanted to buy a Nepal flag. We stopped at a small shop and asked for one. When we tried to pay, the shopkeeper refused to take the money. "Take it," he said. I still remember that little moment. It was my first protest. I didn't really know what to expect. When we reached Maitighar, the streets were already packed. There were mostly students and young people, many carrying flags and placards. People were chanting, singing and talking. There was an energy in the crowd that I had never experienced before. And, at least from where I was standing, it still felt peaceful. We started moving towards New Baneshwor with the crowd. Along the way there were bikers making a lot of noise with modified bikes. Honestly, some of it was more cringe than inspiring, and Pawan and I laughed about it. At around 1 pm, everything changed. We were somewhere around the protest area when suddenly three or four tear-gas canisters landed roughly twenty metres ahead of us. For a few seconds, nobody really knew what was happening. Then the crowd started moving backwards. We moved with them. But at the same time, more people were arriving from the Maitighar side. What had started as a large crowd was becoming something much bigger. The entire street seemed to fill up. Even then, there were people singing. People were shouting about corruption and the things they were angry about. There were flags everywhere. It still felt like a huge gathering of young people who had simply decided that they wanted their voices heard. At some point, Pawan and I stepped away from the protest for tea. We found a place roughly ten minutes away and sat there for about half an hour. Looking back, that tea break feels strangely ordinary. We were just two friends sitting together, talking, while something much bigger was happening a few streets away. When we went back, the atmosphere had changed. Around 2 pm, we started hearing that someone had been shot. At first, we didn't know whether it was true. There wasn't enough network around us to properly check what was happening. Messages were moving from person to person, but nobody really knew what was happening. Then we heard it again. Someone had been shot. That was the moment I stopped thinking of the protest as something I was simply watching from inside the crowd. I heard gunfire for the first time in my life. I remember the sound more than anything else. Then I saw people carrying an injured person past us. Another injured person was being taken away nearby. That's when it finally hit me that this was no longer the peaceful protest we had joined a few hours earlier. We looked at each other. Neither of us needed to say much. We decided it was time to go home. We made our way back, eventually reaching home safely. But getting home didn't immediately make me feel safe. I kept thinking about the people who were still there. The students who had come in the morning. The strangers we had been standing beside. The people singing only an hour earlier. The shopkeeper who had refused to take money for the Nepal flag. That day started with me sitting at home, watching the news and wondering whether I should go. A few hours later, I was standing in the middle of something I had only ever seen on television. I don't know how history will describe that day years from now. But I know how I remember it. I remember the Nepal flag. I remember Pawan. I remember the tea break. I remember how the streets kept filling with people. And I remember the exact moment when the feeling of being part of a protest disappeared, and I realized I just wanted to get home safely. Some memories don't need photographs. You remember them because you were there.