Back to my words..

It’s been a while since I blogged last and well, a lot has happened since then. Pretty much on all fronts.

For those who sought pleasure in sarcastically congratulating me for the election results, you still made me smile, so thanks for that. And I wasn’t hiding away somewhere, unable to face the election aftermath. Just a bunch of professional engagements keeping me rather occupied.

So well, I won’t try and follow the world in advising what the BJP should be doing next.  My mentor had an interesting take on it. It answered a lot of things for me.

A whole lot of intellectual talk came his way after the election – ” You should be introspecting, undergoing catharsis, give up on Hindutva and all of that…”. His response was simple, ” All these ideas and talk is great, but the change that you talk about, what’s going to be YOUR contribution in it? What role are YOU going to play?”

Most people, love advising and solving problems for others – non accountable types – have a lot of gyan to give, but not enough time or enthusiasm to actually contribute something of value. In politics, if you want to be heard, being a pure intellectual won’t suffice. You gotta be a doer – help execute, at least partly, the ideas that you speak about. Or find other ways of contributing – fund them maybe.

With all these thoughts, I’m not going to delve into advising what the the party leadership should be doing with their ideology and political strategy.  I prefer to leave those at coffee tables conversations just like college gossip.

And while I’m rather hopeful with the current way of things, I haven’t forgotten that the same papers, who wrote ‘All Talk No Vote‘ after the election day, screamed aloud that India had voted for secularism,  ‘mandate’ for congress and all of that.  There’s no disputing that congress won the political game, and I respect them for that. But to say that the people of India have awakened to make wiser choices, and that the days of extremism are over – would still be a utopian thought.

Just for instance, in Mumbai North-east, out of 15 lakh eligible voters, about 6 lakh voted. 2.5 lakh each to bjp and ncp and 1 lakh to MNS. BJP lost by a mere 3000 votes. Same’s the case with 5 out of the 6 seats in bombay. I’ll not get into accusing Thackrey junior for sabotaging it for BJP-SS, but just point out that the extreme still got more votes than the congress/NCP as far as Mumbai is concerned.I have collated the nos. from the election commission site, so if you have doubts, feel free to leave me a note and I’ll share with you.

So while feeling holier than me, don’t be too naive and believe all that you see / hear.

So that’s about the state of my mind. Next , what am I looking to do, really. I don’t know how much I will be able to do really. Being a professional with elite education to back me, I want to use these to listen to the voice of people and give them a chance to participate in policy making and execution.

Accordingly, I want to :

– Work with a bunch of IITians / IIM students on some e-governance projects – pick up global case studies, analyse their feasibility in India at a basic level and develop concept papers that can be proposed to the state.

– Interface with  tax payers / professionals of various sorts – understand their greivances and issues (those that are not entirely obvious) and see if there’s anything that state’s intervention can help in.

– Crowdsource issues for the governance / leadership to answer – identify the ones that are most crucial to each group of audience and try to draw attention to them.

– Work on interfacing political leaderhip with industry leaderhip effectively – to enable transferring of ideas at the right level.

– Hold events that involve complete civilans into thinking about governance related issues and contibute with their ideas.

– Use online media to identify, spread and raise the issues that are important to the people and take them to the right places.

A few months into the system I’m still in the early exploratory phase and there’s a lot that may not be within my reach to impact yet, but well, the process is on and the lessons too.

Cheers!