If you asked people on the street to picture a typical liberal, what do you think they’d see?

My guess would be some vague stereotype, like a bespectacled, tweedy intellectual, or a gender-defying protestor with a keffiyeh obscuring their ‘meat is murder’ t-shirt. Whatever image comes to mind, I’d wager that it isn’t an average group of teenagers hanging around outside a McDonald’s. An yet, on nearly every social issue, from sex and abortion to immigration and equality, young people almost everywhere are overhwelmingly liberal. By some measures, the UK even ranks as the most liberal of all. So, why is it that the world seems to be overrun by fascists?

I blame social media, as I often do. More broadly: the algorithms that now rule our lives, dictating who we hear from, what we know, how we perceive our realities.

The right-wingers, to their credit, figured this out long ago. Over the last decade, they perfected the art of exploiting the exploiters, using big tech’s rage-rewarding algorithms to get constant attention, to amplify lies until they became truths. The defenders of liberalism, to their credit, have been trying to fight this in many noble ways. By championing Enlightenment values. By appealing to our empathy, even our rationality. By tirelessly fact-checking people who exist in a parallel, post-fact dimension. It’s all essential, constant, thankless work, yes. But it does feel a bit like bringing the collected works of John Stuart Mill to a gunfight.

Until now.

Despite my distaste for the socials, I do keep an eye on them. And lately I’ve been seeing something that I’ve found quite delightful: reels and TikToks made by young people, often brown and black kids, at right-wing rallies.

The format is simple: they go up to some smirking, mouth-breathing, beer-bellied, red-hatted man (it’s mostly men) and ask him simple questions. How old is your country? What continent is it on? Where do refugees come from? Who’s your favourite black person? Who’s your favourite Muslim person? Each time, they stick a little mic in the man’s face and watch as his brain tries to fire its few functioning neurons, only to offer answers that would embarass a six-year-old. One such gentleman who claimed to be an engineer was all worked up about immigrants having stolen his job. He was asked what kind of engineer he was. He was asked to spell engineer. He was asked to add 8 and 6. He could do none of those things.

It’s crude, I know. Conventional liberal wisdom would frown on such antics. It would be denounced as punching down on the powerless, mocking those who need to be rescued from fascist charlatans, not further antagonised against the condescending elites. But, even leaving aside the illiberal nature of that argument (reducing autonomous individuals to unthinking pawns for the cunning populists), it misses the point. The genius of these stunts is the flipping of the (perceived) power equation. It’s no longer an Ivy-leaguer mocking an honest working man. It’s a brown kid in a hoodie asking dumb questions, often at risk of physical harm, to someone who doesn’t accept their right to be breathing the same air.

Even more importantly, it does what no other tactic has yet managed to do — it beats the right at their own game. It reveals their absolute cluelessness about the very things that they claim to be fighting for. And it uses that to feed the algorithms, finally cutting through the flood of fake, toxic dross we’ve been wading through for a decade.

All by making the fascists look deeply, embarrassingly uncool.

It begins right from the title. ‘Sonnenallee’ is German for ‘Avenue of the Sun’ — or ‘Sunny Street’, in the novel’s own vibe — and the ‘short end’ refers to the part of that street cut off by the Berlin Wall, left behind in the East. In English, it also evokes ‘the short end of the stick’, implying an awareness amongst the residents that they’ve got the worse bargain. (I wonder if this is an intentional reference in the German, too.)

This current runs right through the novel, alternating between the boys’ recognition of their luck in life (Churchill gave their bit of the street away to Stalin in exchange for a match for his cigar; so goes the local legend) to small acts of rebellion against their dictated fates (one boy believes that acquiring a banned Rolling Stones album will literally change his life). It creates a comedic tension that absolutely lights up this sunny street.

Under its surface of silliness and teenage apathy, the book does something else which is equally remarkable. It tears apart the stereotypes of life in East Germany — even more entrenched after the success of The Lives of Others — as an Orwellian dystopia devoid of joy, where Stasi men in grey jackets lurked on every grey street, waiting to catch you making a joke so they could drag you into the back of a grey van. It may be based in truth, sure. But, like all stereotypes, it also swallows other truths. Like the fact that those living in a haze of oppression can still find love, still concoct crazy dreams. Or, that young people, no matter where they are, find their own ways to freedom. Usually via the lolz.

Authoritarians, entrenched or aspiring, want us to think that they’re scary as hell, a danger to everything and everyone we hold dear. That fear is the source of their power. It’s important to take the threat seriously, to fight it in serious ways. But young people remind us — whether in 80s East Berlin or 2025 Britain — that mockery can be just as effective at cutting paper monsters down to size.

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‘Why were we messing around with trigonometry? We should’ve been learning about taxes!’

My oldest friend often airs this complaint about our school days, usually down a couple of pints. Perhaps he’s right, though I doubt it would’ve helped. (I did learn trigonometry, after all, and the only tangents I can calculate are ones like this.) Plus, taxes are like death: something to accept, not understand — much less cheat. No: what they should’ve taught us is how to wait.

It’s not that there weren’t enough opportunities to learn it. Childhood, as I recall it, was an exercise in waiting. Waiting for holidays and birthdays, festivals and friends, for the rain to stop, the bell to ring, the Sunday cartoons to start showing. Most of all, it felt like an interminable wait for childhood itself to end, for real life to begin. With all of that training, one would think we’d be experts at this game, masters of the art of patience.

And yet.

I could bet — if I had a penny not already owed to some billionaire — that even as you read this, you’re waiting for something. An email, a phone call, a report from a doctor, a letter from the government, a sign from God. And chances are that it’s a small fire burning at the back of your mind, driving you to fidget, to doomscroll, to stand in an alley sucking on a vape. (I’m not projecting; you’re projecting.)

It doesn’t help that our culture seems to treat waiting as some kind of personal failure, a punishment for chumps. Podcasts dangle early access to episodes. Shopping sites nudge you to ‘get it today,’ Even my bank keeps offering me savings accounts with ‘instant access’, presumably designed for instants where I have a gun to my head.

It feels futile to complain about this glorification of impatience, let alone fight it. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.

There’s one passage in particular that has lived in my head for years:

Each day there would be a power cut, and each day there would be the unexpected, irrational thrill when the lights returned. […] With what appeared to be an instinct for timing, the rows of fluorescent lamps glittered to life simultaneously. The effect was the opposite of blowing out candles on a birthday cake: it was as if someone had blown on a set of unlit candles, and the magic exhalation had brought a flame to every wick at once.

Growing up in India, I lived through my share of power cuts (and yours, too, I reckon). While I don’t remember them with much fondness, I certainly recognise the feeling Chaudhuri captures here — the ‘irrational thrill’ that shoots through you like a bolt of lightning when the world, dark for so long, lights up again.

Re-reading the passage now, it occured to me that its real beauty lies in what it leaves unsaid. That first comma in the first sentence — the pause between the electricity leaving and returning — is a power cut in prose form, shrouding in darkness the true source of its ultimate wonder. It’s that long suspension — fanning yourself with a folded-up newspaper, watching the candlelit shadows shiver across the walls, trying and failing, over and over again, to distract yourself from the fear that the lights may never light up again — that makes the climax so magical. It’s the wait that makes it worthwhile.

Such is the effect of Chaudhuri’s prose — the mastery with which he channels that most potent force of nostalgia — that, depsite my own harrowing memories of power cuts, I was left pining for one. Not because I miss the suffocating heat of the Indian summer. Because it feels like the only way to stop the relentless onslaught of cognitive overload. To pause.

Perhaps it would do us some good to try it, every once in a while — without suffering a power cut. (And without condemning outselves to some horrifying digital detox retreat.)

What if we tried to build it into our routines, I wonder. Deliberately missing that bus or train to take the next one, for instance. Or, like my father, arriving five hours early for a flight. What if we resisted the dopamine shots served by the algorithms and just sat around and waited?

If you do try it, this book might turn out to be the perfect companion.

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