The Great Indian Marathon

                                                             The Great Indian Marathon

The longest running marathon in India is the political race run every five years. From the day election results are out till the next election results are announced, the race is on without a day’s let up. The race picks up towards the last leg when the runners run at their optimum marathon pace. The political marathon is similar to the long distance running event at the starting point as both have a large number of participants. But there is a significant difference- in the political marathon the participants divide themselves into groups and as in  relay race choose the anchor person for their group who can exhort them to run with him to reach the top of the podium finish. The rules of the political marathon are that it is open to the entire population above 18 and it allows for lane change if they feel the anchor person of their group fails to keep the lead.

The 16^th Indian political marathon that started in 2009 is heading towards a finish presumably in the next one hundred days. Every media channel has become a clairvoyant and using their election tracker methodology has forecast the winner of the marathon. Their readings are based on the pace of the race so far run, the handicaps and hurdles the runners had encountered, their strategies to overcome them and their grand plan of action designed to outwit all fellow competitors in the last lap. Every channel has zeroed in on two possible finalists while the third that had started the race in 2009 with high hopes and expectations is seen trailing far behind the other two.  It suffers from incumbency handicap, compounded by alleged corruption charges and inefficiency. Since the rules permit switching lanes, there is a great flux of coming in and going out of participants from one group to the other, though there are sizeable loyalists who do not falter in their allegiance to their chosen leader.

The winner of the great Indian marathon is to be decided by 725 million  strong electorate, of which first time voters (between 18 and 23) will be around 160 million, semi urban and urban middle class voters 225 million and Muslim minority around 110 million. The rest will be mainly rural electorate with a tiny fraction belonging to the rich upper class. These electorates are divided into four groups and three of them have their anchormen while the fourth is trying to cobble up an alliance with a number of anchormen and anchorwomen seeking the top position.

Who will win the race? In the last few months the opinion polls were unanimous in the choice of a strong,  goal-centric runner with high base fitness levels backed by 15 years of experience in running a state and running it well (though exclusively for his acolytes and admirers). He was off to a running start by running down his opponents-specially the Shehzada(the prince) of the ruling party. But this campaign seems now to run on empty as the Shehzada is no longer to be counted. The Shehzada, like Julius Ceasar has refused the crown every time he was offered it.  The poor Shehzada has been written off by everyone in the media, and so the high seeded competitor has turned to run down the next seed who is the new babe that had started running even before it let loose the umbilical cord of its mentor. Can this new baby whose fledgling steps are at the high speed of an expert runner, turn out to be the winner? Even before he had won RunDelhi, he decided to go for RunIndia, arrogantly claiming that he had already covered it. He started his training with a scandal a day to keep all his rivals at bay. His body language reveals his confidence- as he has mastered the language both of the middle class morality and that of the lower class petulance that makes him a darling of both the groups. He goes through his daily calisthenics that include toe touching of his aam admi groups, tilting the windmill of the police, horizontal stretching on the cold open roads and torso twisting as per the directions of his group in order  to leverage an effective way to run. His training includes promoting physical endurance to avoid dehydration through sipping his electrolyte-replenishing energy from his cheerleaders.

This brings us to the third competitor who even before the start of the marathon has been consigned to oblivion. He has to run with the handicap of incumbency further compounded by allegations of corruption, of inefficiency and incompetence. All the hard training he had undergone to keep himself running has proved to be a waste. But he doesn’t want to hang up his boots and has started cleaning them, making them wear- worthy and fit for running. Is it too little or too late as the anchors lobby their favourite question at him. He knows that unless he runs a point-to-point course from East to West, from North to South braving the scorching and rattling pace of his rivals, he will be nowhere near the podium. He may have to change lanes and cannot be always seen as left of centre which is now the lane of the number two seed and nowhere near right of centre that is occupied by the number one seed. Sometimes he wonders whether he should opt for a three legged race whereby he ties one leg to the legs on the left to outwit the legs on the right. He has to be fiercely combative to be ahead of the other two, but as he inches forward, he finds the other two to his left and to his right making giant strides to overtake him.

As for the fourth group, there is no cohesion as to who should be the anchor person. The ego clashes among the different partners make it difficult to arrive at an acceptable leader. Disparate groups need desperate remedies that unfortunately are not to be found. The gender problems have also arisen with three queen bees clashing amongst themselves and clashing against two of the opposite gender. Can gender coalition be possible for the fourth group to take off?    

So who will be the winner? The supporters of number two dismiss the incumbent (seeded number three) as of no consequence and jeer at the number one seed saying it will be a repeat of the age old story of the hare and the tortoise. The modern version of the story of the hare and the tortoise is slightly different. In the modern version as given by the British playwright Edward Bond, the tortoise is slightly lame which makes the hare supra-confident. As the race begins, the hare runs very fast till he reaches the last lap. He turns to see the tortoise still far away somewhere at a distance of nearly ten laps behind. He decides to take a short nap, but when he gets up, he finds the tortoise at the finishing podium and cries that the tortoise had not completed all the laps. The tortoise standing at the top of the podium says that his over confidence had made him mentally lame thereby underestimating the strength of his opponent’s lameness.

The political marathon is at an exciting state where to identify the winner is more difficult than identifying a needle in a haystack. Time for all astrologers, numerologists, tarrot card readers , star gazers to make hay while the RUNIndia marathon is on.

Six Professionals in Search of cultivating Humanity

                         Six Professionals in Search of cultivating Humanity                                                           

URGENTLY NEEDED !

An ELECTRICIAN 
...to restore the current between people

that do not speak to each other anymore.

An OPTICIAN 
...to change the outlook of people.

An ARTIST
...to draw a smile on everyone's face.

A CONSTRUCTION WORKER
...to build peace.

A GARDENER 
...to cultivate good thoughts.
And last but not least

                                                                          A MATHS TEACHER 
                                              ...for us to re-learn how to count on each other.

An ELECTRICIAN 
This thoughtful advertisement, ‘Urgently Needed’ was one of the good e-mails I received as a part of New Year greetings.  How true that we need just six professionals to make our world a beautiful place. Still truer is that all of us have within us the making of an electrician, optician, artist, a construction worker, gardener and mathematics teacher though none of us is aware of such potential inherent in us. Like the elephant which does not know its own strength, we do not know our inherent strength. The spark in us seems to be like a lamp in a bushel and therefore we remain in darkness and like Matthew Arnold’s Scholar-Gipsy, we ‘wait for the spark to fall from heaven’. We would rather make a call to the electrician to restore power when lights go off than fix the fuse ourselves.  Why can’t we be electricians and like God in Heaven, say ‘let there be light’ and find that there is light. The greyness of the present day,that resembles Milton’s hell with ‘no light, but darkness visible’, demands that we light up the world.  In this modern world of technology, human contact has been replaced by the       impersonal e-mail, Twitter, SMS and Facebook. We think we communicate better and faster through the new communication technology, but the truth is in all these efforts human contact gets lost.  We delude ourselves that we are in touch with thousands of men and women, but the truth is we stay alone with the laptop giving us company. Francis Bacon said: ‘A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.’ Facebook is one such device that has a gallery of faces that we look at without any feeling and often without recognition. The first and foremost casualty of communication technology is loss of interpersonal rapport. The physical gestures and expressions that complement communication through words are absent leading often either to inane exchange of words or getting one’s signals crossed.  We need the electrical current made of words, feelings, emotions, gestures and physical togetherness to flow but not through an open circuit that illusorily connects hordes of people but through a closed circuit that intimately connects people. Today we are like Eliot’s Gerontion with ‘dry thoughts in a dry brain’ complaining

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact?

If humanity is to survive, we have to repair the fuse in our communication circuit for a free flow of the current and restore the vitality of inter personal communication bonded on words, gestures, feelings and emotions.

An OPTICIAN 
Yet another facet of modern life is that we no longer live in isolation and we are closely connected to the world beyond us. While cultural heritage accounts for the tangible and intangible attributes of every society, it is now overladen with the cultural influences from across the globe. Some analysts argue that lasting cultural rigidities will obstruct or perhaps even reverse the globalization process that in the long run will result in alienation. Hence there is an urgent need to balance inherited cultural legacy with the new accelerating culture and encourage change from the earlier tradition. Ortega Y Gasset has succinctly described this tension through an analogy of looking through a window at the garden outside. If the glass is pure, our eye travels through the window pane and rests on the green shrubs and the multiplicity of flowers in the garden. We are not aware of the pane in front of us as the eye goes beyond to focus on the garden. But if we disregard the garden and detain our vision at the window, what we see will be a confused mass of colours pasted to the pane. Hence to see the garden and the glass simultaneously are two incompatible operations and call for different adjustments. We need to be opticians to change our outlook on life. Simply believing that we are heirs to a rich  and magnificent past , we slowly discover that we are living in a time warp and the traditions are inadequate to face up to the complexities of a globalized world. To take refuge in the past is to live in accordance with the optics of monuments. But monumental optics suffers from four disadvantages. It is seen from a distance, seen from outside, has a halo around it that makes it difficult to see it in totality and lastly its passivity that hinders dynamism to change from within. The contrary optics that we have to construct is to recognize that each one us – that we designate as ‘I’- has inherited a legacy that compels us to live with it and to a great extent conditioned by it. When the newer influences make inroads on that legacy, we cannot ignore the thrust and should develop global optics that will enable us balance tradition with modernity.

An ARTIST
 20^th century is known as the Modern Age founded on the slogan: ‘Make everything new’. In the previous century, there was an urgent sense of liberation from the constraints of the preceding  ages and this desire for chalking a new path was evident in modern art, modern sculpture, painting, architecture and free verse(verse libre). The Theatre also saw the emergence of new dramas  that included the Theatre of the Absurd, the Theatre of the Grotesque, Kitchen Sink School of comedy, Dark /Black Comedy, Farces etc that replaced the wit , profundity, satire and humour of the earlier Shakespearean comedies and the 18^th C Comedy of Manners. What we see today is an attenuated version of Comedy best seen in the Comedy Carnivals presently shown on Indian TV channels. We are not a humourous race who can laugh at ourselves. We need humour only to dissect and destroy others. We think of comedy only as Satire and that too Political Satire that employs ironic comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of humor. We have not refined our sense of humour to laugh at the simple foibles of men and women, but often mistake comedy to be one of scatological or sexual humour. The wry smile that is forced out of these shows is a testimony to our lack of understanding good comedy. Our TV comedies do not explore the cracks and contradictions in our attitudes and conventions nor are they a kind of commentary on social life, based on close observation and incisive questioning. Most of the time they fall flat and they try to force people to laugh at bawdiness and vulgarity as the spice of humour that makes one make a Shakespearean-like observation: Humour, thy name is not Indian. Indians, in general do not laugh, but roar with laughter at bawdy jokes. I was once asked by a Britisher during my visit to UK as to why Indians always frown. I recalled my friend’s observation when I falsely replied that we have too much sun in India that makes us frown. We need to draw a smile on our face instead of looking either miserable or sad or serious (this mistakenly goes with intellectualism). We have to trust our senses to see beauty in this world. We are good at mouthing platitudes like the famous Upanishad quote :’ Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram’ without understanding its meaning or putting the precept into practice. Even the NRIs - the Indian born American citizens(or GC holders)- wanting to show off the American in them set out on holiday tours in India and return cursing the filth and dirt and poverty and squalor as they have no eyes to see the richness and beauty that is in abundance in our land. We need to develop the artistic eye to add colours to our life and what better way to do it than by drawing a smile on our face!

A CONSTRUCTION WORKER
The advent of the new Millennium has seen the rise of the ugly face of Fundamentalism. It has given rise to terrorist attacks in the name of religion. Fear, terror, violence and inhumanity seem to be gaining momentum erasing all possible advances in science and technology towards making this planet a happy world. In despair we ask whether it is possible to revert to co-existence of various religions, faiths and ideologies in today’s world. We hark back to cultural atavism to inflict cruelty on those  with different identity. In India, we have drawn indelible lines along caste, class, religion, haves and have-nots and unless they are erased, there will be tension, stress and hostility along those lines to keep us divided. We need to build bridges along these lines that would reconcile the dividing forces. We need reconstruction of our society and make it an inclusive society free of malaise and hatred, of caste prejudice and gender violence, religious bias and class distinction.

A GARDENER 

India has been mainly an agrarian society that depends on agriculture for support and sustenance. Yet the transition to the urban milieu has made us forget the art and pleasure of gardening. The term gardener (mali in Hindi) is used for a low paid employee who tends to the gardens at home, in the offices and in the public arena at all seasons and all weather. But at heart of hearts we are all instinctively gardeners who have to work and live in different environments, seeking job satisfaction of seeing things built from ideas(seeds) to realization(the garden) . To achieve this, we rely on cultivating a balance between good physical activity and deeper mental, aesthetic and spiritual activities. Cultivating good thoughts is essential to develop a tension-free, harmonious development of the body, mind and spirit. Wordsworth the poet of nature and his sister Dorothy created the Dove Cottage garden that stands perennially as an expression of both their personal aesthetics and their practical need. Wordsworth wrote:  ‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ and added: ‘with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.’ We have within us the spirit of the gardener lying dormant and we have to arouse it to cultivate good thoughts and good acts to see into the life of things.

A MATHS TEACHER 
Last but not the least whether we like it or not, mathematics is genetically wired to our system. One does not have to be a Ramanujan or his fellow mathematician G.H.Hardy but the indisputable fact is maths is used in every facet of everyday life. Even those who suffer from maths-phobia cannot escape its everyday presence in their lives. Maths is ubiquitous in our lives-with calculations about measurements in a recipe or totalling our bills or working out the ratio between the gasoline in the car and the distance to be covered  or  working the bank interest rates on our savings and  calculating income tax returns- it is all around us. To count ones good fortunes and count the number of friends also form a part of one’s daily routine. Hence the mathematician in us, however reluctant we may be towards studying mathematics as a discipline, stands upfront in our day to day life.  We may not be magicians to give ourselves a good and comfortable life, but we have to be mathematicians to get it. We are not alone in this world. We are a part of humanity. If humanity survives, we survive. If humanity is happy, we are happy and if humanity is at peace, we are at peace. So we have to cultivate humanity by counting on each other. Let us cultivate mathematics to cultivate humanity.

I am indebted to my friend who sent me this wonderful mail to urgently fill up these six positions in our life.

Happy  2014.

Modern Panchatantra

                                                              Modern Panchatantra

These are three animal fables of modern Panchatantra.  (The original Panchatantra  is essentially a nītiśāstra, where Nīti means "the wise conduct of life" and śāstra refers to a moral  treatise; thus it is considered a treatise on political science and human conduct.) These three modern fables are an attempt to answer the insistent question of how to secure a life in which wisdom, prosperity, determination, action, friendship, and trust  are effectively harnessed to bring a humane society.

The concept of evolutionary biology implies that humans share common ancestry with animals and birds and that some of the mental and moral faculties of humanity have the same traits as the inherited traits in animals. The Homo Sapiens race seems to be a permutation –combination of various animals and birds that prompted Lord David Attenborough to say : ‘I think that we've stopped evolving. Because if natural selection, as proposed by Darwin, is the main mechanism of evolution … then, we've stopped natural selection. We are the only species to have put a halt to natural selection, of its own free will, as it were.’ There are many others who dispute Lord Attenborough’s pessimism and expect human evolution to continue.

Whatever may be the future of the human race, there is no denying the process of evolution through the last 4000 million years.  We can trace our ancestry from fishes to amphibians to mammals to primates to orangutans to chimpanzees to guerillas to the present Homo Sapiens and in many instances we do share some of the features and traits of animals and birds. We have invented many phrasal descriptions such as cat’s whiskers, horse sense, canine loyalty, leonine roar, asinine behaviour, cattle class, hawk’s eye  etc that link us to animals and birds. The political scene in India with elections in the next few months is reminiscent of the jungle raj of our ancestors that had also seen systemic changes in its rule. It will be appropriate to look at some of the Panchatantra stories in a modern version for the readers to discern their own conclusions. 

                                                       The Two Headed Beaver

Once upon a time in a jungle, there was a Beaver who was in charge of tax collection for the maintenance of the jungle, security of its inmates and funds for activities that serve the public.  The Beaver was sharp, hardworking, and had the ability to plug tax evasion by the cunning and crooked animals who were the ruling class. But despite all his persistence, he could not stop corruption at different levels in the jungledom and decided to quit and start a mission to cleanse the jungleraj system.  He went first in search of a Guru and found one who was mobilizing the aam animals to fight corruption. The Beaver joined the Guru and shouted that all netas in and outside of the establishment were partners in corruption. But he soon grew restless and moved out of the Guru’s movement to float his own political outfit on the advice of Yoya, his trusted friend, philosopher and guide to beat all the netas in their own game. The Jungle Spirit intervened and cautioned him not to rock the entire system as it would unleash anarchy. The Beaver refused to relent until he destroyed all the weeds in the forest on which the netas fed themselves and this meant cutting at times even the roots of the trees. The Jungle Spirit advised the beaver to exercise caution and not go overboard and seek advice only of the wiser inhabitants of the jungle and in return she will bestow a boon of his choice.

The Beaver went round the jungle collecting all the aam animals who,  he felt were victims of the  ‘chor’ raj. All the aam animals and birds came flocking to the Beaver with all their woes and the Beaver said that once he  gets to the seat of power, all their miseries will end. He asked them whether he should get to the seat of power and if so, how to achieve it. The aam animals roared that he should be the ruler and that he should ask the spirit to make him the ruler of the jungle. They also asked him to seek from the spirit a second head and a second pair of arms to collect and write all the advice they gave so that with two heads and two pairs of arms,  he could effectively govern the entire jungle.
The Beaver happily went to the spirit and asked for an extra head and extra pair of arms .He had hardly spoken before he was two-headed and four-armed. He no longer looked as one of the aam animals’ tribe and seemed to be worse off than before. As he began to move towards his jungledom to get to the seat of power, the aam animals could not identify with the transformed Beaver and considering him as a kind of demon hammered him with stones and sticks.

Moral: The leader who refuses to exercise his wits and seeks advice from all and sundry will perish.

                                                             The Talkative Tortoise

Once upon a time, there was a tortoise Selfie and two geese by the name Aresses and Beejapa.  The tortoise made friends with the two geese who used to come and visit him at the pond. All of them were together for many years. Selfie by dint of hardwork and iron will became the ruler of the pond. But after fifteen years or more, Selfie felt restricted to stay in the pond and in consultation with his geese friends decided to migrate to more spacious land where he could rule with greater vigour and steely courage.
The three friends decided to leave the pond and to go to a distant place and conquer it and impose their rule and authority.  But it was not that easy for Selfie to migrate to such a distant place although it was quite easy for the geese as they could fly. The poor tortoise could not fly and to cover that distance on foot was really difficult.
All of them had a conversation, as to what could be a possible solution for this problem. The geese suggested a plan, according to which, tortoise would have to hold a piece of stick by his mouth and which would be carried slowly while holding its two ends by them. The only condition was that the tortoise should not speak; otherwise he would fall and die spontaneously. The geese were worried because they knew that the tortoise was very talkative and it was difficult for him to keep his mouth shut. The tortoise understood their logic and promised not to open his mouth during the entire journey.
Before starting their journey, the geese again cautioned their friend not to open his mouth in any case. With this instruction, the geese held the stick ends in their beaks and the tortoise held the stick in the middle with his teeth. Thus, they started their journey. They flew higher and higher, over hills, valleys, fields and plains. Ultimately, they flew over a town.
All the inhabitants of the new land were surprised to see such a strange scene. They started laughing and clapping, to see the geese carrying tortoise like that. Their shouting and laughing excited the tortoise. He thought he should rouse them to a higher pitch to turn their cheer to jeer at the rulers of their land. He misunderstood their clapping that they wanted to make him their ruler in place of the existing rulers.  Unable to control his excitement, he opened his mouth to speak. But as soon as he opened his mouth, he lost his grip on the stick and fell down. So, the ambition of the poor tortoise got lost because of his impatience.

Moral: Rein in your talk if you want to reign.

                                                    The Little Mice and the Big Elephants

Once upon a time, a jungle was ruined by repeated invasions by lions, tigers and even snakes. The jungle paths got totally damaged. All the holes and marshes, sloughs and swamps were destroyed on the whole. Due to this, the inhabitants of the jungle were forced to leave their habitats and settle somewhere else. Finding the place vacant, the mice began to live in the ruined jungle. Soon their number grew into hundreds and thousands.

There was a big lake located near the ruined jungle. A herd of elephants, massive and strong used to visit the lake for drinking water. This was the only way available to them, to reach the lake. On their way to the lake, the elephants lorded over every creature that was present and crushed hundreds of mice daily under their heavy feet. By this callous action of the arrogant elephants, the population of the mice was affected. The problem was getting bigger and bigger day by day.

In order to find a solution to this problem, the mice held a meeting. It was decided that a request should be made to the king of the elephants regarding the problem. The leader of the  Mice, Kejri met the King Elephant, Kango and asked, ‘Sir, we live in the ruins of the village, but every time when your herd crosses the village, thousands of us get crushed under the colossal feet of your herd. Kindly change your ways and permit us to live in peace. We promise to help you in the hour of your need, if you allow us our simple life.”

The king elephant laughed on hearing this and replied, ‘ Kejri, you mice are very small to be of any help to giants like us. But doesn’t matter, we would favor you by changing our lordly ways and our route to reach the lake and making you safer’. Kejri thanked the king elephant and returned to his flock of aam rodents.

One day a group of elephant-hunters came from the West and trapped the group of elephants in huge strong nets. The elephants struggled hard to free themselves, but all in vain. Suddenly, the king of elephants remembered the promise of Kejri, who had talked earlier about helping the elephants when needed. He summoned one of the elephants of his herd which had not been trapped, to go and contact Keji, the leader of the mice. Kejri was smart and intelligent and he told the elephant s’ envoy that he and his aam mice would outsmart the elephant-hunters provided the elephants kept their word and not wear them down and crush them.

On getting the promise of the elephants, Kejri, on his part kept his word and immediately took his entire group of mice to rescue the herd. He found the elephants trapped in a thick net. The mice set themselves on the task. They nibbled the thick net at thousands of spots making it loose. The elephants broke the loose net and got free. They were grateful to the mice for their great help and became friends for ever. Kango and Kejri made their companions- the elephants and the mice to live happily forever.

Moral: Sometimes a weak looking person may prove stronger than others.

Trishanku in search of the Philosopher-King

                                                    Trishanku in search of the Philosopher-King

I am not an aam admi because I have that much in my kitty to pay my water bill if I exceed my allotted 20 kilolitres of water and pay my power bill if I exceed 400 watts of free electricity.

 But I am not a khas admi because none of my articles or even letters to the editor are accepted by the newspapers and newsmagazines.

So I am like a Trishanku, - this and that, there and here. To use the trite English phrase- I ‘fall between the two stools’. Where does it leave me with the present changed political and national scenario?

The simple and short answer is I am stunned, I am bewildered, I am disconcerted, I am frightened. I do not know if any of my Trishanku tribe feels like me, but the gut feeling is there should be many. Hence this piece is on behalf of all Trishankus with a final clarion call to all of them:  awake, arise and disseminate these views to non-Trishankus.

We are stunned at the meteoric rise of AAP. It has been catapulted into the seat of political power in Delhi assembly. It is now eyeing enthronement on the National scene. It is praised by the entire media and by all those who are the inveterate TV commentators for changing the political script of the country. For the media and the acolytes of AAP, every pronouncement from Arvind Kejriwal booms like the AK 47’s assault on all the past 65 years of (mis) governance-( because for him and for AAP, nothing has happened in India post-independence)- making all political parties searching for hideouts to conceal their embarrassment. The chameleon that our media is, it has suddenly shifted its camera to focus on AK   and no more on Namo, least of all on Rahul.

We are bewildered as we are not able to know if it is a real happening or a reel happening. Maybe when the next water/ power bills come, we can pinch ourselves to reality. At present an announcement a day keeps AAP critics at bay. But as AK thunders against all corrupt people, and as Modi delivers his stump speech, we are confused as to who is the better basher of his opponents! While Modi holds a pistol to the dynasty’s head, AK fires his long range anti- corruption rifle at all erstwhile politicians. Even as Modi  punches the dynasty with his rabble rousing speeches, AK spares no punches to drown his opponents in a welter of corruption. We stand bemused at the theatre of abuse played on the political stage by the two and wonder if overblown rhetoric is really the answer to good governance! If Modi harps on Gujarat model, AK sings the aam admi tune of power to the people. We are bamboozled by the oratorical skills of the two as the Media sounds the bugle for the race to begin between Namo and AK. We wonder how to make a choice between the broom that sweeps us off our feet or the lotus that masks its ruthless ambition to ride to totalitarian power. Meantime the crystal gazing Media has written the obituary of the Congress as it stands no chance before AK and Namo and also before  the many State satraps (chieftains) who have tossed their hats into the ring for PM ship. The importance and the status of PM has never become so irrelevant as it is today. There is no room for Plato’s Philosopher King with access to ideas. Plato and his oft cited quote: “A true pilot must of necessity pay attention to the seasons, the heavens, the stars, the winds, and everything proper to the craft if he is really to rule a ship" are passe^’

We feel disconcerted because this is not what India needs today. The blitzkrieg against corrupt politicians is certainly a catalyst to good governance, but it stops at that. Whatever may be the take of AK, the new CM of Delhi, that governance is not a rocket science, the truth is the art of governance is not limited to just a corruption-free government. “Governance is the delivery of a number of critical public goods to citizens: security, rule of law, political freedoms, an enabling framework for economic performance, education, health, and so on.” In India, as per the latest data available, 27crores out of 123crores live below the poverty line. The government has to provide reasonable quantities and qualities of essential public good specially to the poor which points to framing strategies towards inclusive growth. Inclusive growth basically means “broad-based growth, shared growth, and pro-poor growth” that decreases the rapid growth rate of poverty and increases the involvement of people into the growth process of that country. While AK and AAP promise to provide manna to the poor, they have not spelt out their economic policies. Merely subsidizing power and water is not a healthy policy .The announcement of free water and poor is also a form of bribe offered to the voters. People will have to pay for the services they get; otherwise they will not value the thing offered to them. Power and water if given free (even to a certain limit) will result in enormous wastage of these essential resources.  It is in the nature of human psychology to ask for the sun if offered the moon free of cost, not understanding that the sun will scorch anyone who approaches it.  AAP has to be a government responsible for the aam as well as the khas admis and for the trishnaku admis like me. Modi, on the contrary is for dynamic industrialization as seen in his own home state, but it is not a model for inclusive growth. The Congress with its pro-poor policies has not been able to deliver the goods as per its promise. Thus we have an extreme left-centric party and an extreme right centric party and sandwiched between the two is a failed party that is like us a ‘trishanku’ caught between the left and the right. There is not a single leader among these different political groups who has come out with a vision to transform India not only economically, but intellectually, morally and spiritually. It is not enough being personally honest like Manmohan Singh or Modi, Rahul or Kejriwal, or thundering to cleanse the Indian Aegean stables but to uplift the Indian people from the morass into which they have fallen. Character building is also a part of governance and what we see today is total apathy to this aspect. If there is a bribe taker, there has to be a bribe giver. None of the leaders has so far addressed himself to raising the character of the people for  all the measures promised by them are at the punitive level only. None of them has inspired the multitudes to one-point agenda of being clean.

It is frightening to see speeches full of character assassination, accusations, high decibel mockery of political opponents and bribery charges hurled with no follow-up evidence, taking centre stage as political discourse. If people are asked to exercise their franchise on these bouts between personalities, it bodes ill for the future of India. Mere tokenism by symbolic renunciation of red beacons, security staff and bungalows will please a few. But to make such symbolic gestures without addressing substantive issues and mock at the previous governments is not in good taste. One does not expect a CM of AK’s integrity to say that his austerity highlights the contrast with the vanity of the previous CM. It is better to scale oneself up in order to lift those below to that level. If the leader stays on the ground level, it is a betrayal of the people who look up to their leader for a rise in their standard of living. Greatness does not consist in lowering one’s standards but in raising one’s standards for others to follow. Power to the people is only towards giving them voice to speak about their difficulties and to exercise their franchise, but not to abdicate governance responsibility to people’s mandate. Leaders have to lead and people have to follow unless the path chosen by the leader fails to stand moral and intellectual scrutiny.

A majority of people are like me Trishankus. We want to leap up to the standards of Khas admi and not jump down to the levels of aam admi.  In the bargain we will enable the aam admis to fill up the space vacated by us as we step up. Every day we hear thousands of people signing for AAP. Their numbers seem to be swelling and many corporate honchos are joining the party. Good, but can AAP unearth from among them a Philosopher-King whose purpose according to Marcus Aurelius-the last of the good Roman emperors-  is to be  ‘the very best human being one can be regardless of the circumstances one finds oneself in’.