Column

This column is dedicated to all those students who have fared poorly or failed miserably, are currently scampering for admission into colleges or contemplating suicide. I’ve only one word of advice to all of them. Politics!

You’ve already wasted enough precious time studying the Pythogoras Theorem and Trigonometry. It’s time you put an end to such pointless education that you’ll never get to use all your life! After all, there is a lot more to life than fancy degrees, high profile colleges and jobs in multinationals.

Politics is an interesting option for a variety of reasons. For starters, it gives you easy access into places that should otherwise be out of your reach. Like the college that rejected you for scoring just 35.5 per cent in SSC. If you’re in politics, you could barge into the same college and blacken the principal’s face!Or you could pelt stones at the office of the MNC that might never employ even in your wildest dreams. As you can see, politics is where the possibilities are limitless, academic qualifications inconsequential and no retirement age!

The beauty of politics is that you are free of any accountability for your words and deeds. And you never have to say sorry. So you don’t have to feel guilty about causing irreparable economic damage by bringing a city to a standstill through a bandh or a riot.

The beauty lies also in the fact that on the pretext of crusading for the common man, you can put him through untold misery by stoning or burning public transport and curbing his freedom of movement through fear and intimidation. And you never have to do it for the right reasons.

Take the newspaper or switch to a TV news channel and you will find that all those in politics are having a ball. They are busy organising bandhs, dharnas, vandalising public property, demanding quotas or threatening elections in these inflationary times. In other words, in our country, politics is actually giving terrorism a complex.

Turn to the inside pages of the same newspaper and scan the international headlines for reports about politics in developed countries. Those poor guys lead a boring life - they never seem to bring their cities to a standstill, sabotage public property or harass their own citizens for cheap political gains.

So, you see, it takes little to be in politics if you aren’t really serious about serving the people. Best of luck!