It's the 26th day of November today. An ordinary date - except for the fact that within the next 24 hours the ritualistic process of my wedding will begin. Exactly a week back it was the anxiety of getting the polled EVMs back to the strong room (Chhattisgarh assembly went to elections) that described my life, now it is that of becoming a householder. In between elections and wedding, one sits here realizing how utterly similar the two are.
Both Elections and Weddings (especially the big, fat ones) are exercises in mega event management that inevitably end up consuming the entire energy of the administrative (or the familial, whatever is applicable) setup for the preparation and conduct of "ceremonies" on a given day. Both exercises demand a lot of compromises from the routine aspects of life (again, administrative or personal) and leave the respective acting players praying for some time off.
Both are guided by heuristics/guidelines - either scriptural or ECI's. Irrespective of the source, they are almost always too cryptic to be understood by a novice and too sophisticated to render a singular interpretation. In fact, just as any other crucial event in Indian life, both elections and weddings invoke the divine power multiple times - whether it is to determine the exact date and time of submission of candidate's nomination paper or to check the match-quotient of the couple.
It's often stated that an Indian wedding is a miracle in itself - as it wrestles with multiple complications and expectations and still manages to fall into place, eventually. Over the last few weeks, one has come to realize that elections are no different. A proactive and disciplined officer, if present at the right place, may streamline the process (i.e.decrypt the divine guidelines and cut through their absurdity to make people follow them) but there have been and are numerous places without such officers and elections have gotten conducted. One might argue the qualitative nature of things but the question of eventuality remains undisputed. So be it elections or weddings, the "Ram-Bharose" nature of things cut-through both.
A satirical perspective would not exclude the hope and utopian expectation that usually characterizes both elections and weddings. Despite that, both these mega-events are only and overtly cursed in common parlance. Yet one just hopes that maybe this time over, things will be different. Amen!
PS:
All views expressed here are purely personal and have no connection
with those of the Government. This post has been carefully modified to
fit into the ambit of freedom of speech permitted to officers under the Rule 6 and Rule 7 of All India Service (Conduct) Rules, 1968.
