Democracy in action

For the past few weeks there has been a lot of excitement in the college campus.The reason for this is the upcoming student body elections.In these elections the posts of general secretary,cultural secretary and various other office-bearers of thre college student are elected.Compared to elections of student bodies at places like Delhi University where the stakes are extremely high and political parties through their student wings piut up candidates and spend hundreds of thousands of rupees and student leaders enjoy enormous clout,ours is pretty low key.The general secretary has only limited powers.He can give only suggestions,the decision to accept them rests entirely with the authorities.But this lack of powers has not acted as a disincentive.Currently there are three contenders for the top job and hectic campaigning is going on.Promises are freely made,regardless of the fact that some promises,with the limited powers that go with the post would not be possible to fulfill.Charges and counter charges are being whispered in tight groups of students at the canteens,college gates,the roadside stalls outside the gates and at the hostels,to mention a few places.Ours being a college in which every state has a particular quota of students,students of every state vote en masse for a particular candidate and try to convince their juniors coming from that particular state to vote for the "official" candidate.And the
juniors usually acquise to the request.So the candidates try to get as many states in their pocket as possible.Being engineering students the candidates have also used technology to campaign by creating communities at community websites like orkut to drum up further support. Along with the elections to to the post of general secretary ,elections for class representative for each class are also being held.These elections are taken just as seriously.And during these days we find the idea of siiting in our classes and listening to some droning lecturer a tad more boring.

And you might now ask me with which camp my sympathies lies or how much campaigning have I done.And my answer would be zilch.My answer might offend some democratically minded folks but I prefer watching the show from the sidelines.After all the show,being the small brother of the great Indian Game called Democracy has many amusing moments.And I could certainly use a good laugh.