In times of stress, it relaxes the muscles and de-clutters the mind to look elsewhere. So, Hamlet comes to mind. His soliloquy, ‘To be, nor not to be…’ haunts me these days.

When anything haunts you, the best you can do for yourself is to modify it. It is the academic’s version of exorcism. I was both: academic and priest. So, exorcism of both kinds lurks hypodermic in me.

The democratic dilemma to me is, ‘Should I laugh, should I cry?’

You could think I am crazy. Well, I’m not. Or, if I am, it is not by choice. Living as we do in times such as this, we need to have hearts of flint to be less than crazy. Like Eliot’s lady typist, we know our nerves are frayed. We grapple privately with the fear that we might go bonkers any time. A hard time we have of keeping the fizz in.

A mighty and mythological endeavour is in progress in Kerala, Bengal, Assam and Puducherry. Who will rule for the next five years? That seems to be the only question that matters to everyone. To me, that is the least of the furies plaguing me.
My problem is a simpler one. How to survive at all. Strange, no one seems to be interested in this one question that hisses inside my bones. Everyone is obsessed with ‘Who’s winning?’ In this obsession, they forget that they are losing.
Governments come and go; each one, elected by us with great fervour and fanfare. Every five years we are promised the moon; or what’s left of it. We live to bite the dust. The vaudeville goes on!

May be, it’s because age is catching up with me. Today I cannot help the thought that elections serve a psychological, not political, purpose. Today I am inclined to agree with some of the BJP zealots who feel that elections have become superfluous, given how predictable the results are. Why waste money on conducting them, when they make no material difference? To me, what is distressingly predictable is not the results of elections, with or without the EVMs. What drives me over the edge is the predictability of the result of results. No matter which party wins, I lose. Yes, you are right. There is a difference even then. In some cases you lose your pocket. In others, you lose your head. Lose you shall. Governance has become a soccer match, which you lose even before you kick-off the ball.

It’s not easy to live with this feeling. May be, it was some such thing that made the Malayalam poet, the late Akkitham, say, “Light (knowledge) is sorrow, my child.” So, let us snuggle our faces in the bosom of darkness. Let’s thank the powers that be for putting ‘the opium of the masses’on the public distribution system (PDS) in the form of elections.

To Marx, religion was the opium of the masses. Of course, he was ambivalent about its role, contrary to what we assume (perhaps influenced by Lenin) he said or meant. It was Lenin who corrupted Marx with the ‘anaesthesia theory’ on interpreting‘the opium of the masses’. Marx saw the relevance of religion in a better light: the sigh of the oppressed, feeling in a heartless world, the spirit of the spiritless scheme of things that prevail. It is an awareness of the suffering of humankind as well as a protest against it, though after its own fashion.
Had Marx lived a few more decades, he would have modified his views. He’d have said,‘politics is the opium of the people’. Today, if people in their millions everywhere in the world are kept insensitive to the true nature of their predicament, not by religion, but by politics. Electoral politics, in particular.

Surely, that’s something? As a shrewd Indian politician, Chandrababu Naidu of TDP, said about the relevance of temples and churches, but for them thousands will be running amok on the streets. I am in ready agreement with Naidu, as far as he goes. But I feel he needs to go farther, and recognize the psychological function of elections; if only because little else is left to it.

This is truly amazing, mind-boggling. Nothing that our species has discovered matches elections in their capacity to improvise and sustain delusions, albeit for a brief spell of time. And when that spell breaks, there’s always the power of propaganda to bank on.
So, the juggernaut of the great democratic elections rumbles on. Citizens strain their muscles, shout themselves hoarse, some risk their life, to ensure the victory of their beloved representatives, who do not find it all that worthwhile to represent them thereafter. So, they represent whatever else they are required to, given that a whip is held over their heads.

For a few weeks, once every five years, the whip is handed over to the cozened citizens. They play the role of king-makers, like desperate souls drinking themselves to death. They press EVM buttons with aplomb. Disempowerment descends on them even before they leave the booths. It shrouds them when their representatives do the victory rounds on their streets. Losers all, they retreat deeper into their backyards to sit and lick their wounds for the next five years, before it all starts yet again.