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| Rahul’s random thoughts | | | | It is no coincidence that Mr Rahul Gandhi’s sound bites on lack of criteria for promotions in politics and a television advertisement (on tea of all things) lampooning a rustic politician on his lack of qualification for "desh ko chalane ka job" have been on air at the same time. For, both Mr Gandhi and the advertisement echo something which is agitating the minds of the urban youth at present. Are our politicians up to their jobs? Do they have the mind-stuff to guide an impatient India to its proper destiny? The answers are laced with pessimism. Media snapshots of politics give us visuals of satraps and their crude cohorts jostling for power and gaining positions which should ideally have gone to more "qualified" people. Sycophancy and favouritism rule the roost. As a television channel quiz revealed, there are even politicians who don’t know who wrote Vande Mataram. In this context, Mr Gandhi’s decision to set up a Youth Leadership University to make youth and student leaders of the Congress get familiar with the past and present of the country is welcome. It is a trifle ironic that it required a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family to ruminate loudly on "random promotions" in politics, but that does not divest the thought of its resonance in many minds. Mr Gandhi is saying the right thing at the right time. However, that is only one side of the story. The media habitually focuses on venality and corruption. But the fact remains that there are also veterans who have come up in politics fighting tough battles and doing their mite for society. They may not have certificates to show for it, since they studied in the "school of hard knocks," as the Americans call it. When Maxim Gorky termed the street corner meetings and encounters with the people in different sections of his society as "my universities," he was accidentally talking about the better lot of Indian politicians too. This is qualification too. And in one sense, Mr Gandhi’s much-publicised attempt to essay a new "Discovery of India," through journeys into the nation’s heartland is a process of self-education along the same route. |
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