Woman of Letters: Consumed by ambition

Dear Kiran Bedi,
Let me start by recounting how the first time I had heard you speak, I'd experienced a fandom moment.
It was at the IIC sometime in the early '90s and you'd addressed a crowd consisting mainly of women in one of that venerable institute's auditoriums.

There you were, with the Asian Games, Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting and the then recent Tihar triumphs, under your nifty belt, all fire and brimstone, with your surprisingly squeaky voice, speaking very fast and perhaps, a tad too glibly, but all the same, very charismatic and inspiring in a feminist icon kind of way. After it was over, I distinctly recall that you were mobbed.

But that was a while ago Ms Bedi, and much detritus has since flowed down the Ganga, as you might have noticed. You won the Magsaysay, did a stint at the UN, left government service to write books, ran NGOs, anchored TV shows, joined forces with a rag tag band of political activists, downgraded yourself to economy to finally join the BJP and got named it's CM candidate for Delhi!

And along the way, you have been regarded as a shrill maverick, a brazen publicity-seeker, the BJP's Trojan horse in the aam admi party and most recently as a rank opportunist and cynical politician no different from the rest.
And let's be honest, from all the negative feedback that you have received in your long and illustrious career, the last has been the most scathing.

All of a sudden, people on social media and across India's drawing rooms are frothing at the mouth over you. More than the howls of derision that followed hapless RaGa during the run-up to the last election, more venom than was heaped on Srinivasan and his stranglehold on Indian cricket, far more than was reserved for all the Indian scamsters in all the Indian scams, it appears, people have taken grave umbrage of your latest career move.

Which brings me, of course, to the subject of naked human ambition and why it offends us so. Described as 'eager or inordinate desire for some object that confers distinction, as preferment, honor, superiority, political power or literary fame,' the word ambition ironically traces its roots to the Latin word ambitio — a striving for favour, literally 'a going around', especially of candidates for office soliciting votes.

The extreme response to your demonstration of this emotion has made me question why we humans take so much offence in something that has burrowed such a deep tunnel in the human psyche. You are not the first politician to turn coat, and God knows the BJP is not the first party that has placed winning an election (or trumping an enemy) above all else, so this is not where the answers lie.

The answer, Ms Bedi, I think, lies with your recent public avatar, the blustering, unwittingly comic buffoonery that has accompanied your debut into electoral politics.

Not a minute passes when some TV anchor or rival politician does not appear to effortlessly get the better of you. From that icon whom I admired (albeit a long time ago) at the IIC, to those antics recently with a scarf used as a duster to gain political mileage to sites like '12 Quotes That Prove Kiran Bedi Would Be Awesome To Get High With' (No. 2: It's a mystery when and how my thought changed), it's all very alarming.

"I have no spur/ To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself, And falls on the other," said Macbeth, the patron saint of ambition in Shakespeare's tragedy.

I suppose had Sarah Palin uttered them the result would be tragi-comic too.
Nice scarves, by the way.
With every good wish,
Yours sincerely etc,

malavikasmumbai@gmail.com