The elections are upon us.. Yes, 'upon us'- sounds as if its a necessary bitter medicine forced down your throat every five years , sometimes far less than that...
Suddenly the same rusty old party functionaries and fat bellied, balding leaders are grinning at us from ear to ear from Wall posters, banners and TV screens...
Let us get one thing clear...
It is one fashionable thing for celebrities like Aamir Khan to hand out encouraging platitudes and inspiring words about the 'need to vote for future’ and or management fundas like 'be the change you want' etc...
But it’s quite another to separate the tolerable from the rotten, the solid ones from the riff raff or filter the promising ones from the hopeless stinkers that inhabit the plane called Indian politics...
The mindboggling question refuses to go away:
Whether we should vote on party principles , if you can manage to find some, that is, amid the chaos of alluring promises they make only during the elections, or… vote on individual candidates as per their integrity, character or social standing, again, if you have the time and tools to measure them….
So how easy is it to inspire the nonchalant electorate to ‘go and out to do your job’, when the whole onus always falls on his or her frail shoulders as to who to vote…
Oh, sure, its fantastic to have all these illuminating websites like jaagore.com or media campaigns like Lead India…
Even if you do walk into the designated polling booth on the said day and time , is there any guarantee that you will find your name figuring on the rolls , will you be allowed to vote or turned away, just because you did not bother to check in advance to confirm it…?
So selecting to elect your representatives still is the core of the problem…
Amid, in spite of the reports of ‘cash for votes', liquor and other ‘timely incentives’ doing their job in the background on the bulk of the ‘gullible electorate’, as they are termed…
I have an issue with that too, just because one is uneducated or poor or both, is that enough reason to be unethical, greedy and susceptible to corruption…?? Doesn’t speak much of character or integrity on the part of voters there, now , does it?
Meanwhile the Tamasha unfolds on most major TV channels..
Mother versus the Magic woman Mayavati, ‘Operation Kamala’ by which BJP will, without pangs of conscience or ethics, swallow the hardcore Cong men and burps…
One Gandhi scion , Varun ‘rains’ abuses on minority community and gets himself jailed and becomes a sort of martyr, while the other , Rahul already a crore pathi tries to woo the secular public of UP…
All aged and ageing film stars have already entered the fray making this a mega multi-starrer blockbuster…
So, ‘collections’ will surely be heavy this time….In fact, these collections will go on till the next five years, unlike the shorter shelf life of their forgettable films…
A kind of a big Political multiplex arena, this one…Which will be a ‘hit’ and which a miserable ‘flop’?
If we cannot 'hit upon' the right candidates, it will surely hit us hard!
( pun unintentional)
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