The ageless politics

A climax that turned out to be worse than an anti-climax, even from modernist Hollywood movie standards. Yes, we are talking about the debate between POTUS (President of the United States) and the ex-POTUS. The resultant song and dance about the performance (or lack of) of the most powerful person on the earth also shows the clear priorities of a section of his own party, namely, his performing prowess on the stage and not his record in governing the country. Well, here the oldest democracy in modern times has many lessons to learn from the largest democracy in the world.

Ever mindful of the likely consequences, our political leaders abhorred such theatrical debates, inside or outside the studios. The rule of the game being never to let even a semblance of reference point come near you, which potentially is liable to be highjacked to make the comparisons about the relative performances. This effectively takes care of ill-thought off live debates; focusing instead on the monologues.

We, the public, in any case tend to take very compassionate views about what is said during the campaigns simply because making sense of what is said remains outside the scope of our purview. The fact that leaders are making physical appearances – and speaking something – has always been more than enough to whet our political appetite. Certainly, factors like coherence and articulation do not enter in to lexicon of campaigning terminology. One has to be careful though that his/her/their voice is not raspy (as unfortunately POTUS’s reportedly was) and words are not mumbled: loud and clear even if offensive, is kosher. The fact that we are way more tolerant is borne by the fact that we don’t give two hoots whether our leaders are shuffling or not, it’s not as if we didn’t have such leaders but some of them were rather adored by the public. Perhaps because they were not under 24×7 glare of the social media.

The impact of teleprompter is something one can agree with brethren from across the Atlantic. Many of our otherwise lively leaders were seen to be reduced to boring and listless when reading from the prepared speech in contrast with their extempore selves. But thankfully such prepared speeches are reserved for formal events only. The question of having other occasions, such as interactions with the political donors or the media, situations where the advanced countries are prone to use teleprompters, do not apply to us; naturally. Not for nothing we pride ourselves in being the `Vishwa Guru’, after all didn’t we visualize the distant messy future and nip the problem in the bud? It’s time to launch `US-India initiative on Campaigning and Ageless Politics (iCAP)’.

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