To Vote or Not To Vote

The great Indian Elections are a few days away. These elections will hopefully lead to one of the politician becoming the Prime Minister of India who would be responsible for "running" this democracy of ours. Every time there is some new issue but this time there is a strong movement asking the young electorate to stand up and vote. A huge number of forums and websites have sprung up urging the same.

Initially, I was also very excited and felt proud that so many people are making an effort to spread the message. All of us must and should vote. It is our fundamental right and we should exercise it.

Having said that I sat up and looked at the people fighting for the post of Prime Minister this time around.

On one side we have an 80 year old leader who has been vying for this post throughout his life. Some newspaper brought out the exact thought that I had in mind... “If we expect the people who work in and run the companies to retire at the age of 60 years, why should we vote for a Prime Ministerial candidate who is 80 and is supposed to form the policies which would affect all those companies?” Shouldn’t there be a retirement age in politics as well...

I realised that he is many generations apart and I can’t expect him to think and act for the future though I appreciate him for trying to be tech savvy.

This leads me to the current Prime Minister. Though I really respect him as an economist, I really don’t know why I should vote for him. Oh! I forgot. He is not even contesting any constituency. So I really can't vote for him. 

I get stuck at the fact that if he is not elected by the people, why should he represent India? People may argue that constitutionally it’s alright but then the constitution consists of rules which were based on some rationale and I guess this is just an example of ways to follow those rules but not the rationales.

Though I really don’t want to talk about the third possibility as it scares me (trust me), for the sake of completeness let me present to you the Third Front. This supposedly Third Front consists of people who all consider themselves as Prime Ministerial candidates. Just to prove my point, they could not even decide who the Prime Minister would be if by chance they win the majority.

This leads me to the 3 words at the end of this post’s title. What’s the point of voting when I know that I do not want any of the fielded candidates to become the Indian Prime Minister?

The constitution did provide a way out for people like me... I can write on a piece of paper that I do not vote for any candidate and can submit it to the Electoral Officer... But this is India and I know how much value a piece of paper carries.

I guess it would be better for the forums and websites to push for a law which will add this option in the Electronic Voter Machines so that next time someone like me expresses his/her opinion by not voting for any candidate, it actually counts.

The Paucity of Names

This is not about the names that our parents gave us. This is about the names we choose to use to login and display on the numerous website that have become a part of our online life.

I remember when emailing was considered as doing something cutting-edge, there was a mad rush of people trying to create email ids with their names. When I joined the bandwagon, even with a unique name like mine, I had to contend myself with stupid numerics added after my name (suggested by the website). After that Gmail came along and suddenly I found that I was the first person amongst the same named people to create an account. My joy was boundless. I had finally got an email address with just my name in it. That's the reason I even rejected the [dot] in between the first name and last name that Gmail suggested.

Then, why am I writing this. Well just scroll your eyes at the hyperlink you are at and you will know. The time I decided I wanted to write a blog I searched for BlogSpot and went about creating an account. It says on the website "It’s easy, and only takes a minute."

It took me 45 minutes just to get to the page where I could start writing. The reason being, I got stuck at the textbox that said "Blog Address (URL)". This is the textbox where you create the link to the blog you are going to write and involves suggesting a name after which [dot] blogspot [dot] com will be appended.

I obviously started from my name, then my last name, my short name, my 'friends call me' name... After exhausting that list and clicking "Check Availability" each time, I moved to generic things like ‘dreams’, ‘life’, ‘confused’... After a few more minutes, their synonyms and antonyms... Then to the items in my house, ‘curtains’, ‘windows’...

After about 43 minutes, all this enormous neural activity made my stomach grumble, which led to, me going to the refrigerator and taking out Choco M&Ms to munch.

Trust me I felt like Archimedes and screamed Eureka!

All this made me realize that as we move towards a world where the internet is spreading to an ever increasing number of people... how would the internet techies solve the problem of paucity of names?

Because in the end, a name is the starting point on the internet. Maybe they have to do something like what they did with the IP addresses (for the non-geeks, google "IPv4" and "IPv6"). But then this was possible because IP addresses were essentially numbers. Names are not numbers and you have no way of knowing what the next person born in the world will be named.

Till that time comes I guess people will be noticing things around them to use them as their online names. Well noticing is not all that bad... 

P.S. Some of you may have noticed that my link is “chocomnms” and not “chocom&ms”. Well as I found out after 44 minutes, BlogSpot doesn’t let you enter special characters except for '-' It took me another minute to replace '&' with 'n'. Oh maybe the BlogSpot website was talking about this one minute only...

The Choices

Today I watched "Lions for Lambs" and something rang in the back of my head. I realized that ‘something’ is the plethora of choices our generation faces. I let it come to the front of my head and came to the conclusion that it basically boils down to only two. Let me try to explain these.

The 'First Choice' is to follow the Shiny Dream. Study hard, become an engineer, do a MBA, get a job and buy everything shining, from a diamond to a sportscar to a big house to a yacht. You may not follow the same path of engineering plus MBA, but maybe grind your way through medicine or chartered accountancy or the Indian Penal Code, but I guess the final goal will be the same.

The 'Second Choice' is to follow the Not so Shiny Nightmare. Study harder, get through IAS, get into the bureaucracy and do something about it. You may again not follow the same path, but maybe would try to become a successful politician or join the Armed Forces.

Now that the basics are clear, let me dwell into why choosing amongst them is tough.

The 'First Choice' is not because of greed but because we as middle class and/or working parents' children have been moulded to think like that. We have heard and even seen our parents toil away so as to make our lives comfortable and therefore want to continue and progress on the same line and become even more successful than they are. As my parents say, "We didn’t have all these facilities; you do, so make good use of them". I do not believe that following this path is immoral or will not help all of us, as in the end someone has to buy stuff to drive the economy.

But I guess it would not give us the kind of satisfaction that following the 'Second Choice' would give. The satisfaction of ‘going out of the way and testing your limits’. Sure, there are many hurdles and a lot of red-tape but then if the current generation does not get its hand dirty, we can be assured that the future generations will remain in dirt. And also maybe we DO have the basic facilities that our parents did not have; we can afford to dive into this.

Thus on one hand we have something that we have really wanted to do throughout our lives but on the other hand is something that we have realized recently is also as or maybe more important. I guess the current environment has had a lot to do with this awakening as more and more people realize that for us to succeed as a human race all of us have to work together.

But then again the Shine’s sole purpose is to attract...