And the Winner is……

           The mercury has climbed to a record high. The Indian General Election 2014, dubbed the nation's “first big social media poll” is now just a stone's throw away! As the poll fever shoots up…up…& away… we also witness a huge transformation manifesting itself across the dimensions of an age-old customary event associated with the elections. An event which has established itself deep within the system over the years, an affair which has come to assume the proportions of a rather ‘necessary social evil’ ...... Election Campaigning!

          With a huge chunk of the campaigning laddoos now being distributed to one and all through virtual outlets like instant messaging sites and social networking websites, electioneering has undergone a paradigmatic shift in style & strategy this year. Facebook,WhatsApp & YouTube have become the prime pulpits of political parties everywhere. Not to forget Twitter and its chatter tweets too. Electioneering 2014 sports a stylish & savvy outlook as political parties leave no ‘media’ stone unturned to woo the social-media savvy masses to cast their votes in the favoured direction.

So?...

So... Friends, Indians, Countrymen...
With such freely available & relatively effortless mechanisms in place 
And with political parties turning tech savvy all around
Is it not high time that our country campaigned and voted for 
‘PAPER-LESS-ELECTIONEERING’ too? 
Shouldn’t we put an end to this massive consumption of paper 
Throughout geographies and across political boundaries, 
For the purpose of elections and election campaigning? 
Why hold on to such evil bit of archaisms, in these cutting-edge times? 
Leave it… Let it go… 

 A couple of hundreds of more trees on Earth won’t create an imbalance to our planetary ecological system in any way! Guaranteed!

             It’s important that every Indian vote and play an integral part in shaping his own future. However it’s also important that every Indian does so intelligently. With Electronic Voting Machines and even secure Internet Voting mechanisms in place, why not think about
shifting towards a more nature-friendly election campaigning mechanism as well!  Walls plastered with torn paper posters dated from the-beginning-of-time, have become the indelible mark of any Indian city. And a retrospective combing through the annals of by-gone elections would only serve to strengthen our conviction that there has never been a wide-spread post-election clean-up or re-cycle mechanism ever. And we don’t know if there will ever be?


        The support of free as well as paid virtual online media has in no way diminished the scale of campaigning usually carried out through other paid media like newspapers, televisions and FM stations. Radio stations and Live campaigning still play the greatest roles in campaigning rurally, and rural India is where the majority of Indians live and work even today.  

        India is not a country that boasts of 100% internet penetration. Well…for that matter, the fact remains that India is not even a country with the necessary percentage of electricity coverage across its geographies. Sadly enough, over 300 million people in India still do not have access to electricity. Millions of Indian villages still remain steeped in total darkness. I personally don’t understand the relevance of campaigning or promising changes in such lands where people have lived without progress or change for too long.  So long that they would no longer be foolish enough to harbor hopes to see any change at all in the near or faraway future. I often wonder if our politicians still do not feel embarrassed to even think about campaigning year after year in front of such masses, to elicit votes in return for thin air…

         Urban India appears to be celebrating Indian general election, 2014. The race among political parties to stand out from the crowd in terms of innovative trends in campaigning has become quite entertaining to say the least.  A huge number of animated video clips, regular feeds to news channels, full-length song videos, video testimonials ranging from sentimental to purely mental and so on are now seen to be raging across media. So much so that I was not too surprised when one fine day I caught my three year old laadli humming and dancing to the tune of one of the very popular campaign songs that keeps popping up on telly & FM every now and then.
This ‘entertainment…entertainment...entertainment…’ is bound to carry on till the 12 of May this year anyway. Let’s wait and watch for the magic to end and the miracles to follow soon after.

So coming back to Earth…..as this big-budget campaigning continues to play and re-play itself across the human mind-space, moulding and breaking opinions and images, why not do a small sacrifice? Why not stop the use of paper in political campaigning?

However puny a campaign this might sound like, when compared to the 'gargantuan things' that man is capable of doing (& that which he 'has been doing')... this small sacrifice has the capability of endowing bigger and better benefits to us in the long run… 

 Let’s do it for ourselves as well as for the living space we occupy…
Let’s steer towards a greener & cleaner country. 

Vote for GREEN...

References: 



Pic Courtesy: www.emirates247.com
voteridcard.org.in
www.tamborinedailystar.com
www.examiner.com

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