The Backdrop: Move over, all of you – it is time I wrest back control.
And while I am at it, I, the citizen of India, hereby solemnly declare that YOU are perilously close to getting fired.
Some of you will be re-hired in due course, but on my terms. In fact I am going to draw up a SLA (Service Level Agreement) for all of you to adhere to.
Can we clean up the political system? Screen grab of the Lok Sabha
For the back-drop, let us rewind to 1949, when a few of usdrafted a detailed guide-book, perhaps the heaviest such enabling tool-kit in the entire world. Words mostly, but the spirit was important too. You have forgotten both, it appears.
The preamble begins with the words, “We the people…..”
Try and focus hard now, for what follows seems to have eluded the not frighteningly significant powers of observations and comprehension you possess.
The preamble ends thus: “…do hereby adopt, enact and give to ourselves this constitution”. Do pay heed to the word “ourselves”. Quite distinct, don’t you think, from “yourselves”?
And then I appointed you, through some arcane mechanisms that a Parliamentary Democracy comes pre-fitted with, to run the affairs of this country. While I busied myself conducting, if you will, my own affairs. Some overt in a worldly, material and familial way; some, covert in an eye-brow raising way. Issues of hedonic importance that occasionally consume my being, take nothing away from the fact that the Constitution was drafted by me, for me.
Somewhere along the way, you got delusional and took to hallucinating that it was drafted by you, for you. And that you were supreme. Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again!
A little garden-variety psychoanalysis, and I can diagnose that you have developed illusions of grandeur and self-importance which may be explained by something that possibly happened to you when you were held upside down, and given a pat on your bum the first time you wailed. Were some of you, Sir/Madam, dropped on your head back then, intentionally or inadvertently?
What explains you telling me that you are supreme, and actually living the lie?
I, the citizen of this nation, who handed over the reins to you while I went about more important tasks like spending weekends trawling through Shopping Malls and reading informative newspaper reports titled “10 clues: he/she is NOT into you”, am supreme. Just because I blabber once in a while, entertain myself with research by statistically-challenged folks and pursue a few epicurean delights, does not dilute my stake in the affairs of this nation. Just last month, I did that all important thing. I punched the EVM. A most vicarious act this, the punching business.
Politics, I am realising, is too critical an activity to be left in the hands of some of you. Truth be told, I am to blame for the rot as well. For starters, I have been generalising and exaggerating a bit too much lately, unable to separate the chaff from, well, the chaff. Prone to squeezing all of you — wrongly — inside one little box labeled “dirty criminals masquerading as politicians”, but allow me that rant. It obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance. I will temper it a whisper – some scrupulous and supreme behaviour by you will, willy-nilly, nudge me in the direction of such tempering.
So do nudge. I am quite naïve and staggeringly nudge-able.
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