Of the people, by the people, for the people

When the going gets tough

The journey of Hashmi Dawakhana to Ministry of Ayush, of Ramkrishan Yadav to Baba Ramdev, and of Ajay Singh Bisht to Yogi Adityanath. There is a strange commonality in all three of them. Covid-19 tested the trio to their mettle.

Ministry of Ayush successfully became relevant throughout with its various recipes of Kadhas and Churans. Baba Ramdev too distributed free Coronil kits after people refused to buy the over-priced quackery. Yogi Adityanath successfully averted any tragedy by arresting journalists in daylight and solving mortality data issues at night.

For a government department, a business tycoon, and a chief minister, this must not have been an easy feat, but when the going gets tough, the tough can always cry on television.

Cancel culture

The explosion of the Internet and social media has strengthened public memory. People control the narrative today through a strange culture of digging informational graves and calling people out. So it is common to see a video from 2013, of party men protesting inflation. It is all too supportive to cancel the contemporary narrative, hence called the cancel culture.

Information today then is no exclusive domain, and as much as it contributes to the post-truth, it also starves the traditional form of the power circuit, which thrived on short public memory. Maybe this culture will cancel all things out and pave way for a new starting point, maybe it will question itself, die out of self-doubt. It’s too early to say!

Party outfit

The perfect party outfit is one that goes unnoticed. It has to have a touch of civility and a hint of provocative. There was a scuffle at one of the borders of Delhi between a party and an outfit. The party’s activity was allegedly disrupted by an outfit. The outfit maintained that they were civil and that the party was provocative.

All in all, parties should not decide the nature of the outfit. If one is invited to the table by the other for 11 consecutive rounds of negotiations and all of them failed, maybe the party should just accommodate the outfit and let go of the dress code.

Too early to say

A popular campaign/hashtag/trend ran on Twitter which said #Isupporttwitter, wherein, the popular sentiment was to oppose the new IT rules. It was of the Twitter, for the Twitter, by the Twitter. Twitter argued that they are here to protect democracy, the protesters at Delhi borders urge youth to opine on twitter to protect democracy; the govt. says that farm leaders are here to disrupt the democracy. The intelligentsia believes democracy is an idea in making.

When Mao was questioned as to what has been the impact of the French revolution on the course of world history, he supposedly said, “it’s too early to say!”. The role of protesters, twitter, government, and the people in democracy exists in the spaces they occupy in relation to each other. May it is time to find the strain in the relation, to level with the decay, the inequality. It appears, it is the time to say, or it will be too late to ponder.