A handful of thoughts

As a kid, the election day for me told the story of deprevation and betrayal. My parents, who always took me along wherever they went, dressed up and went out together, to come back after some time with the mark of dark blue ink on their left forefingers. All I knew was they went to ‘vote’ and I was not allowed in there. Once I even managed to convince my dad to take me to the polling booth, thinking I would get a glimpse of the way things looked. But alas, I had to stop outside the gate of the booth. My dad left me standing there, and cam back after a few minutes, with the same dark ink on his forefinger.The procedure between entering the booth and getting the ink-mark bothered me immensely and made me utterly curious. I showered by dad with questions about the color, size, look, font of the ballot paper and the ballot box (the EVM is rather new to the Indian democracy) and went to sleep far form contentment.

As I grew up, the election procedure gradually got transparent. Rather, the lack of transparency in the process became clear to me. However, the first time gave great shakes. It was a municipal election and I remember voting for an independent candidate out of spite for the ruling party. Those were still the days of the ballot paper and voting seemed to be great fun. With the coming of the EVM or the electronic voting machine, it has become pretty mechanical. Voting these days feels like withdrawing money from the ATM machine, the only difference being you need to press the switch just once.

On the 15th Lok Sabha polls however, I had planned to be the first voter in my booth, but my sleep betrayed me as usual. Woke up at 7 and managed to reach the booth only at 7:30, missing out on a possibility of personal glory. The first voters are usually retired old men who go for morning walks. Actually this first voter fad came up in me after ‘The Telegraph’ made a story on first voters at Nandigram and Singur. Since then, I had promised myself that small piece of limelight. Not that my constituency gets as much publicity, but still….you know….

Unable to fulfill this fantasy I came back home, gorged on some real high calorie breakfast and started watching the television. Of course I safely tuned in to a movie channel. News channels are not safe to watch on election days. They are more likely to show faces of first voters on certain booths.