for the past four or five days i have been so hooked to the television its not funny, considering the fact that my end sems are going on it is even less funny. this is NOT a good time for examinations, especially for a 21 yr old who has voted for the first time in the loksabha elections.
i have realised that politics gives me a high. not the actual electoral battle, but the academic analysis that follows. i wasn't so engrossed before the elections, during the campaigns, i did follow the campaigns, but not as assiduously as i followed the exit polls. the post poll analysis, the nitty gritty of cause and effect, the dryness of it all, ...its fantastic. because it is more or less objective, and unbiased, because i like intelligent and politically conscious people speaking, because the speakers are usually devoid of party affiliations...
i have also realised that at heart i am a skeptic. i would much rather be an intellectual who sees both sides of the question than a ranting activist. i truly believed that in our state a change of order was needed, but i have little or no faith in the opposition(if you call it elitism saptarshi, then so be it.). i believed that the government needed to be jolted out of their complacence, and this the best possible way to have achieved it, because these are the loksabha polls and would not actually entail a change of order in the state legislative assembly, but their humiliating defeat would perhaps give them the much needed slap-in-the-face and shake them out of their hubris. if these were the bidhaansabha polls i would have been much more apprehensive of what the future would have in store for us...
i am satisfied with the results, but i am not fooling myself that these results will automatically translate into better government, because it won't. the pigs will inevitably begin to behave like men. and if the party at the centre wins again, next time, we would have to resign ourselves to the authoritarianism of the seventies and the tyranny of a dynasty. if in the bidhansabha polls we see an action replay of the loksabha polls, then we are sure headed for unruly times.
saddest part is, this imperfect and terribly fraught situation is perhaps the BEST we could have hoped for under current circumstances. if i had to choose between a communal, a pseudo-communist and an elitist party, i would choose the elitist party a hundred times over, but that doesn't necessarily mean that i would be perfectly happy with my choice.
