Lessons learnt and to be learnt

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There is so much of discussion going on about results of latest assembly elections in TamilNadu, Kerala, Assam, West Bengal and Pondicherry. Governments have been toppled, glorious victories have been claimed, a sustained assertion of power has also taken place and there has been an interesting development of making inroads into an impenetrable zone and even blooming at one place.

My new found interest in politics has come as a surprise to my family as till 2 years back my knowledge in politics was almost negligible and I was one among the crores of educated youth who considered it as a dirty game and took their names only to blame and complain. But what has changed in the past 2 years? When I started talking about politics at home my mom asked me this question. Is it because I had married a man who believed in a strong political ideology and also believed that every citizen should participate in politics? But no, I had woke up to active political discussions even before I met him. I had started to take note of politics in India during the 2014 Parliamentary election. The sudden rise of Mr.Narendra Modi is what kindled the curiosity in me.

I was stuck by the fact that a person who was spoken about across the country with terror, in a short span of few months had become the star crowd puller for his party. All of a sudden he became a model politician and his name could be heard in every nook and corner of the city. The city road sides adorned his huge life size banners screaming out a vision of a developed nation, promising a Gujarat model development plan. Prior to that, i had heard his name scarcely in news bulletins. People who supported him and even argued in his support - like my colleagues in office, I guess would never even have heard or read about him before, were his die hard fan and also were talking about the Gujarat model development about which they had no real statistical idea except for which was presented to them in a shining manifesto. So how come he could garner the attention of the whole nation? How did he mesmerize the youth of the country who had been indifferent to politics till then? This was a puzzle that actually got me to follow politics.

Frankly I have never been his supporter or admirer - but the aura with which he towered over all his friends and enemies in politics did make me notice his personality and also pushed me into following the political developments in the country. Once I started reading in detailed I understood that there was a huge PR strategy behind the whole campaign. The whole campaign was planned by the PR group intelligently targeting the tech savvy youth of the country. We are people who with access to the internet have details about the whole world at our disposal but do not have time to do any analysis or are basically lazy to get into statistical real data and so we will believe and gobble any story given to us in silver plate, cooked as we want it. We can never connect with the ground reality the way we connect with the social community on face book and twitter. So the whole campaign was aimed at bringing us into the magical world of developed India and building stories only around things that we understand or matter to us.

This is one part of the whole plan that I could grasp. I am sure there will be so many other parallel plans developed by the PR agency, which was implemented successfully and hence the unbelievable victory of the greatest show man.

This is one area where the other parties should learn a lesson from this charismatic man. It is imperative that the lessons are learnt by the right people at the right time so that our country gets a real leader who leads his people out of poverty by keeping them safe from the hands of crony capitalists who by the power of monopoly are influencing the policies of the government and pushing the people into poverty. Today the country is developing but its people are just poor and cannot afford the development.