Comic Book Campaigning

Who is in the cartoon?

Who is the joke on?

Is it

The mock earnest neta

Thinking he's got the moves

Stats, demographs, castes, segments, splits, bits

Professing instant love-

For ALL

The, Those

Abstract hordes-

Or the unimpressed janta

That very tangible bussed in

barricaded

herded

rehearsed

Told

New pajama and turban clad

They're trucked in but untricked

A kind of professional too

They know the rates

And the perks of their participation

And are

Too inured to be conned-

Crowds are crowds but votes are votes.

The pitch from the platform

Suggests lullabies for idiots

Dumb lines

Written by contemptuous cowboys

Riding the campaign bus

The rent a crowd

Waves the provided party flags

And thinks of the money

The outing

The food

The drink

Maybe a trick or two

Admires the helicopters

Careful not to yawn at the promises

Claps because the crowd meisters want you to

They watch you

And won't pay for lack of enthusiasm.

The TV channels

Frantic for TRP

Don't want to be too deep

Cut complexity

Project tamasha cliches

The hot-aired speculation

The heat and dust

The crushed flowers

Cops

Lal battis

Convoys

Crowds

The easy listening sound bytes.

The papers trying out their trial balloons

Trying to hide their biases

Like indelible tattoos but couched in reasonableness

Sucking up because sucking up now is being counted

And later it will mean

Money and junkets

Awards and prominence

TV

Maybe Internet too

Though

You need to be on the winning side

Or no more wrong than the next scribe.

Gautam Mukherjee

Copyright Gautam Mukherjee 2012

Dream Fight

It was a long drawn argument

But inside a dream

A humdinger-

Give no quarter type of slanging

angry toing and froing

wordy, urgent, but somehow incapable of escalation

As if it was wearing a governor-

Interesting how in a dream you can deftly act out both sides of the fight

With equal gusto

And have the words and thoughts

For all the people in the frame

Only one of whom is you

Or is that truly so?

Sometimes

Not even that-

There's No You-

No one looks like You

But you're there

In spirit

In the heads of others-

You

Put words in their mouths

Expressions

Stances

All that

It's like playing yourself in Chess

Animating both sides of the table

But not so cerebral

Because you're actually

Arguing-

Or getting others to do it by proxy

But only in your dream-

Waking up is realising

No harm done

It was

No consequence venting

In privacy,in silence, and the dark

Like a sharp thought

Expressed without witnesses

One that

Leaves you unscathed

Not very enlightened

But

Definitely feeling better.

Gautam Mukherjee

Copyright, Gautam Mukherjee 2012