Skip to main content

Power Games


The primary objective of power, particularly political power, has seldom been social service.  A peep into the history of political powers of various types will convince us of that without any doubt.  Political power is an intoxicant: as good as a drug is to the addict.  People don’t capture power by spending billions of dollars or crores of rupees on image building and propaganda in order to render service to anyone.  People ascend the rungs of political power because the heights intoxicate.  Putting it in a more acceptable way, success gratifies or gives one a sense of fulfilment.

The Hindu
Self-actualisation is the highest goal for any individual, according to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory. Alexander the Great had as much right to make his conquests as Diogenes had to sneer at those conquests.  Albert Einstein would have been as out of place on a Prime Minister’s chair as a Prime Minister would be in Einstein’s shoes. So, let each person gratify himself.  But let us be clear about one thing: Diogenes and Einstein didn’t bring doom on any section of people.

A Prime Minister who has put Machiavelli and Chanakya to shame with his manoeuvres and histrionics may describe himself as “Prime Servant,” while in the background
shrewd moves are made on the political chessboard.  It is important to understand those background moves if one is to know which discourse is being written upon the palimpsest that the country is. 

The discourse matters.  The Europeans colonised much of the world in the past two centuries in the name of a discourse which they fondly called the white man’s burden.  Israel has performed a vanishing trick in Palestine in the name of a discourse that Palestine never existed.  Hitler’s discourse cost 6 million Jews their lives and eventually cost the world 60 million lives. 

The discourse matters.  That’s why it is important to notice which individuals and groups are being given prominence and which are catapulting themselves into prominence. 

Powerful oratory is capable of creating impressive facades to edifices.  But what goes on behind the facades is what will matter in the long run.



Comments

  1. Its an interesting take Matheikal. With the existing frame of things, it looks like it is a power struggle more than a service oriented job and it is further more justified with every slight issue being made into a political one from a normal social one.The one day we might start seeing a difference is when we start looking at it as a job over a position of power..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There seems to be an underlying agenda, Vinay. That's not at all an encouraging awareness/feeling.

      Delete
  2. Absolutely....being a public or political figure, the power of oratory is a plus point...but time and again it's not just the talk but walk the talk will bring much needed changes... It's time the basic physiological needs to be taken into consideration by the ruling team.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mr Modi knows what he wants and he will achieve it. Will it be good for the country is something that can be debated. However, the debate will have to wait until his motives become clearer.

      Delete
  3. I sincerely hope that the message that you are trying to convey - to look beyond the obvious and to seek the truth and not be gullible to misled ideals - does not fall on deaf ears (or eyes in this case)

    I hope that people become wise enough to sort stuff out for themselves. I am also beginning to write a more socially applicable topic. Let's see how it goes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Quite many people in India are not interested in anything more than economic welfare and accompanying benefits. But some of our political leaders will bring in other things in the name of religion and culture and create problems.

      Delete
    2. Yep. The moment religion enters the arena, everything changes. All variables become obsolete and all that matters is the factor of religion. The leaders have realised this and are capitalising wrongly on it...

      Delete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

  5. The majority, is coaxed to look at "only now " benefits, and is not given much time to go beyond religion , caste and community. They are not disturbed by the historical horrors of the past.

    Disturbing trends.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...