I believe the best definition of the word ‘democracy’ was described recently to me when I asked a rickshaw-puller bhayya last week about his notion of world politics. His response summed up and loosely translated: the function of alcohol is intoxication, do I really care about how beautifully ornamented the decanter happens to be? I think his little speech was only short of the label and the price tag that he perhaps was not poetic enough, drenched in sweat under that hot afternoon sun, to add on, but left little to my apparent intellectual imagination!
The world that we live in today, if democracy is not the biggest mockery of freedom, then will the real Mr. William Wallace please stand up?
With half his face painted in the blue hues of the war-cry for freedom, William Wallace had inspired and conjured up certain elements pertaining to the word ‘freedom’ that, us kids growing up in the 90s, almost revered – held sacred. Sacrificing your life in a battlefield that employed big-toed Yeti abstractness such as honour, loyalty and nationalism had perhaps died with our generation. I have not seen it evoke similar passion in kids even a year younger than us and have more often been branded as fools in their eyes.
Fools indeed if we witness the current state of affairs around us that latches onto any excuse of the honour from yesteryears and sucks it dry of any and all monetary value. So much so, that you are either armed with cynicism to combat the harsh ground reality or only remained starry-eyed behind bolted, closed doors! Romanticism was just not a notion to be toyed with anymore or entertained by intellects of the 21st century and this language of freedom became extinct with the likes of William Wallace and his audience.
It was when talks about Narender Modi was still flying in the air and contemplations were trickling down from one grapevine to another and Chinese whispers continued among the big celebrities, that I lost interest in it all. I had been avidly following every bit of news on the Indian elections till then, starting from Anna Hazare to the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party to the current Prime Minister of the biggest democracy in the world – India. It was interesting how right on the eve of the elections, I stopped listening. The topic of interest that was making my blood boil at the mere mention, suddenly lost steam and seemed rather futile to me. See up until then, I was only investigating, probing further into every actor involved, reading biographies, and captivating childhood stories. Then the plot thickened. All buck seemed to come to a stop at the same junction somehow. Soon I started to experience a nauseous bout of deja vu from the election circumstances in Bangladesh from the year before and funnily similar snippets of the Australian elections from the year before last! It was a series of recurring scenes from the past and seemed to have all been pre-recorded.
Such was the case with most elections in the past few years. Even if we briefly consider Obama’s office and the godlike stature he was presented with initially, expected to change the ways of the world by descending from seventh heaven. When reality struck and he started working at a more humane pace, he was instantly rejected by the rest of the world, almost as fraud! It was unacceptable that he was not able to put two successive terms of disaster back into order overnight!
Choices are not always enough to prove a democracy exists if the results are going to get dumped in the same place either way. Forcefully getting people to choose and vote during those times can also feel like an imposed right and no less ancient than monarchy or dictatorship. On the other hand, it seems rather easy to add a touch of magic during election campaigns by using any of the available weapons of race, religion or culture to appeal to our emotions and raise our expectations, but that did not necessarily reflect the style of governing thereafter. In our local political aspect, a fundamentalist-minded party can have similar, if not exact, outcome as an extreme leftist party, allowed to operate in similar circumstances. The only difference is in the formal name of the religion i.e. style of policymaking. The execution and results can be eerily similar. Again oddly reminiscent of the example I had heard about the effect of the liquid inside and not the design of what it was poured out of!
What we have today is the 21st century democracy that offers us choices that we cannot choose from and forces us to choose one. Democracy today is all about not having an option. And somewhere in the process, about not caring anymore.
Source: bdnews24
A boring piece. May be a “cut and paste” job.