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Sanch is good-looking.

You can be as self-aware as you want but let’s not pretend: people who look and speak a certain way get treated better. She has cherubic cheeks, a neutral, aspirational Indian English accent and a broad, disarming smile. She is fair-skinned. And she knew how to wield it.

She is also witty, righteous and fluent in the vocabulary of justice. She defended trans rights, sex workers, marginalised castes and animals with the kind of conviction that made people stop scrolling.

And then there is her tragedy. Her life was already a slow-burning heartbreak. That’s the uncomfortable part to admit, how tragedy gets filtered through palatability. We’re more likely to want to save someone if they meet certain metrics. Do they look a certain way? Speak a certain way? Present with just enough vulnerability to feel noble but not so much it makes us squirm? Sanch hit all those notes.

Social-justice Instagram is obsessed with deconstructing oppression like peeling an onion: remove the layers to reveal class, caste, colour, fatphobia, disability, chronic illness, mental health. But in practice, we still engage primarily with our class peers. The rest? The delivery person. The domestic worker. The auto driver.

Even within our class, hierarchy thrives....

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