Why politics has become boring

Mediocrity is a big bore. What can be interesting about people fighting for power, money and manipulations? I never took interest in politics for a large part of my youth and my well-wishers said it was because I was too full of myself. They were not entirely wrong, I agree. I was an egomaniac to a great extent. But I was interesting enough to entertain my well-wishers. Otherwise they wouldn’t have taken me as seriously as they did.

Eventually I began to take interest in politics. I was forced to. The massacre of the Sikhs that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination jolted me, but I rationalised it as a reaction, disproportionate though, to the brutal killing of a prime minister by her own security guards.

When Graham Staines was burnt in his wagon along with his two sons aged 10 and 6, I was hurt too deeply to write about it. The gruesome act was perpetrated by Bajrang Dal fundamentalists who claimed that Staines was converting Hindus into Christians. I have always opposed religious conversions. But I have always defended works of charity carried out by religious people because India needs such works. The kind of work that was done by Staines had no comparison with the kind of violence perpetrated by Bajrang Dal. India does not need violence. What hurt me beyond words was the killing of the two innocent boys. Nothing justifies such cruelty. Such cruelty makes religion and culture a big mockery.

While a dominant political party harped on Islamic terrorism in India, it failed to look at its own terrorism, the kind of violence unleashed on the country by its allies. This led me to take interest in politics.

A decade and a half after the murder of Staines, the missionary made an appearance in the novel which I was writing (and which is still in the process). Let me quote the passage from that novel:

Graham Stuart Staines and his two little sons were burnt alive in their station wagon by some Hindu fanatics in Orissa. Father Joseph was extremely worried about certain happenings in many parts of the country. Christians were the targets of many recent attacks in Gujarat where churches were vandalised wantonly. Maybe, a new leader was emerging, thought Father Joseph. Religion has been the handmaid of political power more often than not.

The Staines couple worked among the poor tribal people neglected by their government, particularly those inflicted with leprosy. They brought dignity to human lives.

“They corrupted the tribal culture,” explained Mahendra Hembram, one of the killers.

“How did they corrupt the tribal culture?” asked the prosecutor.

“They made the people eat beef. They made the women wear bras. They stuffed sanitary pads between the women’s legs.”

The new leader who was emerging in the novel goes on to become the Prime Minister of the country. A lot of massacres were perpetrated in the meanwhile, the Gujarat riots of 2002 being the most unforgettable.

What is interesting about such politics? What can be interesting about communal hatred, violence and massacre? Along with those, now we have the comedy of petrol and diesel prices rising like an arrogant but whimsical kite whose thread is in the hands of a boy of the type that Shakespeare immortalised in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport.”

My grocer and vegetable vendor and fish vendor, almost anyone on whom I depend for my essential requirements tell me, “When the fuel prices rise, everything becomes dearer because everything is brought by transport systems that depend on the fuels.”

So I decide to tighten my belt and sit before my laptop converting my hunger into words for blogs. That’s not interesting exactly, I guess.

I find myself longing for statesmen instead of politicians. I long to listen to at least one political leader today who can tell us that there is a way ahead of this mess that the country has become. I turn the pages of the three newspapers with which I begin my mornings hoping to read at least one report that gives me reason for hope. Perhaps, that hope is interesting. Hope was the last item in Pandora’s Box.

Comments

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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth. He called it ‘preventive system’. The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed. Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

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...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog