A person has an aquarium, which has variety of fish. These fish lived in harmony and peaceful co-existence as they were properly fed and taken care of. One day, the person had to go to another town for some urgent work, and he did not make any arrangements to feed these fish during his absence, as it was a short visit.
Few hours after he left, the fish started getting restless. They were looking for their food. But it was not coming through. They were hungry. They started getting violent. At that moment, the person came back and he saw the situation. He threw some food into the aquarium. All the fish went after that food. He was surprised at this unexpected behavior of his trained fish. They had forgotten all their ethics and were now lapping up at anything they get hold of. As soon as he threw something in one corner, all fish would gather around that. Next moment, he threw something in opposite corner, and they all went after the new food.
The political situation today resembles that of this aquarium. The politicians are starving for publicity. They know that there is a huge opportunity, as the credibility of entire political system is at its lowest. The opposition wants to utilize the low confidence of public in ruling party, to its favor, while the ruling party is comfortable to see that the opposition is in bigger disarray. The situation is so bad that the ‘aam admi’ is forced to choose the lesser evil, rather than looking for someone good.
As a result, the politicians have forgotten all their ethics, manners and protocol inside and outside the parliament. They are just looking for any issue to corner the other party / other party’s leader. The benchmark has suddenly changed from publicizing ‘good deeds done by one self’ to ‘bad deeds done by someone else’.
No wonder, we are seeing the headlines in media about non-issues. The impact of ‘a slap’ gets debated for days together. The statement made in lighter vain of ‘only one slap?’ gets dissected to levels putting the microbiologists to shame. The people demonstrate no qualms whatsoever to take hard stands on TV debates. The public is forced to watch this sordid tamasha in the name of news.
The levels of this ‘one-up-man-ship’ have risen to such dangerous levels that this may well augur the extinction of corrupt politicians from the scene. The opposition is trying to corner Chidambaram for many months now. First it was the involvement in 2G case. Now, it the ‘conflict of interest’ case. The charges against Anna Hazare do not seem to stop anywhere. His every word, his every movement is being seen closely to find faults with him. Why do people give more weightage to ‘misappropriation of travel allowance’ and ‘alleged tax evasion’ than the multi-crore Commonwealth games scam and Adarsh society scams? Why have we reduced ourselves to such levels that we take pride in finding faults with others?
There is an interesting scene in film ‘Mohra’ in which Sunil Shetty brings two under world gangs in front of each other and sparks a fight in between them by shooting from a hideout. The result is that both the gangs get decimated. Something similar is happening in political arena today. The only mythological comparison we can make is that of ‘Samudra manthan’.
Let us hope that some ‘Lokpal yukt’ nectar comes out after this lowly exercise.
No comments:
Post a Comment