I do not worship the ground Arvind Kejriwal walks on. So, have no cultishness to him. A political leader in India will make enemies. S/he will be strong and insistent about what they think is right or wrong. Other equally strong people will disagree. There will be differences and accusations. They will be called megalomaniacs. There’s no escape.
Murderer, thief, intolerant, sexist, parochial, pathological liar, psychopath, etc. are things we should be more worried about at the moment. Not politicians who lie once in a while or force their opinions through.
Jawaharlal was a megalomaniac. So was M K Gandhi. Ditto Ambedkar.
They wouldn’t have achieved what they did if they didn’t believe that they were right and fought fiercely for it.
They wouldn’t have achieved what they did if they didn’t believe that they were right and fought fiercely for it.
And it is not just politics: Manekshaw, Rommel, Eisenhower, Monty, Napoleon, Shivaji, Ashoka, Akbar, Clive.
Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Kurien, JRD, Bezos, even Narayan Murthy, Ratan Tata, and Azim Premji.
Naipaul, Hemmingway, Hunter Thompson, P G Wodehouse, even Douglas Adams.
Frieda Kahlo, Hussain, Picasso, Rembrandt, Da Vinci.
You name a successful person, and chances are they have a megalomaniac streak with a ‘I am right’ running right through them.
Take the first woman to run a marathon, the first woman to win a Nobel, the first woman to become head of government, the first woman billionaire. Each one of them was a megalomaniac.
They had to be.
If they weren’t, they’d be dissuaded, discouraged, pushed down, and lose.
We’d never hear of them.
Now, let us see a list of other megalomaniacs: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Churchill, and so on. What difference do we see? That it isn’t that they were megalomaniacs that was the problem. It is WHO they were in addition to being megalomaniacal, that was. Secondly, it is also what they DID with the power they acquired using their intelligence and single-minded focus that comes only to those who not just think but know they are right. And lastly, how they affected history.
Trump and Modi, Kim Jong Un and Bin Laden, Gaddafi and Saddam are/were made of the same mould. No one questions their intelligence or their drive. No one questions that it was their megalomania that drove them to do what they did, and in turn, the successes they gained fed their megalomania. But it is NOT the megalomania that was their problem. It is not for that we hate them. It is for what they did with the results of the megalomaniacal focus they brought to their work.
As of now, AK is doing all right. And I have reason to trust him. If he shows a nastier, darker side that is to the detriment of society, of course people like you and me must abandon him. But until then, he’s OK. And most importantly, even if and when he proves to be the wrong person to bet on, it won’t be his megalomania that would be the issue with me.
You are frustrated. You see no party or leader deserving your vote. You see corruption, nepotism, venality, and gaming of the system everywhere. You look around and see ‘People Like Us’ (PLUs) sitting around wringing their hands ruing the state the society is in. We all agree that we must do something. PLUs should come into politics. Why do the well-educated (inevitably IITs come into the conversations like this) enter politics? What are they afraid of? There are people who have had the best of education, are smart and intelligent, and have had exposure to the political shenanigans and know their way around the labyrinths of Indian politics. Why do these people not form a party? Obviously, these would be IIT-educated people who come from ‘good’ families and have had experience inside the government as technocrats. How about IAS officers? Yes, PLUs must participate in politics otherwise we are doomed. Even if the rough and tumble of politics needs a thick-skinned person, surely we have one amongst us? Even if one requires a bit of oratory, a bit of rhetoric, a few tall promises, this is not rocket science. PLUs must be in politics. They can focus on the issues that really affect us, like roti, kapda, makan, medicine, and bandwidth. Like pollution, policing, and so on. They will be less corrupt (‘Thoda to hota hi hai, yaar’, we say). They will be more educated and so will know their priorities; instead of talking of mandir-masjid, they’d focus on schools and hospitals, roads and sewage, governance and administration. We need these people.
Then, an AK comes to the fore. He is everything we asked for. He wins over the PLTs (People Like Them) from the slums and the bastis, from the railway tracks and rickshaw owners, from tiny tea-stall owners to small shopkeepers. He works on clean water and uninterrupted, cheap power, on bandwidth availability and pollution control, on better schools and accessible health.
But the establishment doesn’t like him (obviously). They create hurdles. They harass him and his team. They plant stories. They slap him. They ink and egg his face. They jail him and his colleagues. But he goes on. He could have made more money and led a happier life where he was. He chooses not to. He is the exact person we kept wanting but never being able to be ourselves. THE EXACT person. IIT-IAS-respectable-family-simple man-incorruptible. A true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool, certified PLU.
Do you think this man gets support from PLUs? The answer is obvious. No. We nit-pick, we turn our noses, we point to small flaws and tiny infractions, we show our backs to him.
It is tiring to defend against fake or irrelevant news spread by BJP and INC shills, like ‘AAP MLAs hit the Chief Secretary in AK’s presence’, ‘AK conspired to banish Admiral Ramdas and YY and PB’, and ‘AAP is actually BJP’s B Team’ when their own leaders are literally crony capitalists and genocidal maniacs. The conversations distract the discourse and force me into being defensive. And I find it silly, and a waste of my time. Finally, I give up. So, I am free to complain loudly about why ‘good people’ don’t enter politics. Sigh!
I cannot do what he does. I can only do what I do. But I can support him through what I do. And that is very little. I write. I contribute. I debate. I try and change people’s minds. You should too.
