The months and weeks of the political circus that is the Indian election season is finally coming to a close. What should be a dignified process of selecting able bodied leaders to run and uplift the country has, as always, turned into a display of exactly why close to 50% of the nation does not want to vote.
Everyone in India (urban youth- youth as defined by political parties can be up to 40 years of a person’s life) knows that a country with around 70% of its population below the age of 30 years is governed by leaders whose numbers count among the other 30%. The people contesting do not inspire anything other than vomit and the underlings and regional politburos are nothing but a crazy mirror image of their idols – the ones with all the money and power.
In a blatant display of stupidity, more and more campaigns are being created to get the urban population to vote. Most of these claim to help wake people up (jaago re), get them to vote via the crowd mentality (lets vote, vote india) and other such “ground-breaking” ideas. Maybe what the campaigns and their drivers should think about is what the voting public wants from them and the politicians who finally profit from their traffic stopping campaigns – the right to not vote.
I do not want to vote. My vote means an exercise in freedom and I have used it this time to vote for someone who will not get voted in. What I want is not a jaago re, its a jaagte raho. A campaign or a setting in which every single politician gets a report card that shows what they did, how corrupt their officials were and how the funds that my taxes have created have been used. I want to know why a country that has the opportunity to grow globally has actually got no prescence in the world forums. I want to know why India’s foreign policy is the weakest in all the BRIC nations.
I want to know why India is still counted as the one of the worst places to do business due to its corrupt politics and red tape laden bureaucratic process.
I want to know what my money gets me. Right now, all I see is broken roads, sad infrastructure and religious extremists who put in a 1:1 dog fight with any regular Indian would stand the same chance as a regular Indian does when they stand up against them and their power play today.
—————————–
Yes, I might be blogging again after all.
The departure was one brought on by a feeling of futility which, along with laziness causes one to believe that one cannot and does not want to write; something which was closer to the truth than I would otherwise admit freely.
My returns to blogging are as hopeless as a pro wrestlers attempt to retire and live a peaceful life so lets see where this goes.
4 Comments
Excellent comeback, nath boy. Go tiger! And not in the pro LTTE sense. It’s these morons that make me glad I’m as yet ineligible for a voter’s id (‘NRI’ status).
Reading this post takes me back to a similar article in ‘India Today’, which I had read about a decade ago – which is almost as old the “Road in the pot-holes” joke. The feeling of being cheated, of forcibly lowered expectations by the ‘leaders’ and of sheer helplessness (despite the power of voting) remains unchanged.
The nation has been riding on a ‘high potential’ for quite a while, barely even reaching where it could possibly have. Indian politics, has sadly become a arena where the winners are those that remotely ‘promise’ the much lowered expectations of the ‘masses’.
—-
P.S: What a return!!
Well if it isn’t the return of Roddy ‘Raghunath’ Piper!
Aloha Phoenix
http://www.hindu.com/2009/04/27/stories/2009042755711200.htm