Elections 2009 is a real mockery of Indian Democracy. National level parties started a new regime of advertisement campaigns. BJP and Congress coming up with branded products and brand ambassadors like L.K Advani, Narendra Modi, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and many others in line.

Promises like subsidized food, farm loan waiver, income tax exemption limit, creating jobs, saving youth from job cuts etc. are the major punch lines of the advertisements. Time is not far when we will be seeing frequently any BJP or Congress leader endorsing brand BJP and Congress in tele-shopping advertisements. A day will come when it will be mandatory for politicians to be a diploma or a management graduate in marketing and sales. Experience in media and acting field will be preferred.

Who will or who are running our country, Film Stars, Television Actors, Sports Icons or any local super star? Isn’t a shame on a democracy of a million? Don’t we ask ourselves even once before voting that do we need such people who don’t even know E of Economics, S of Statistics, or P of Political Sciences? Who don’t understand the complexities financial markets! Who don’t understand why there is a job cut in market? Who know the words like recession and inflation like any other vocabulary words written in Oxford dictionary!

Sitting in their AC rooms on leather couch, watching a flat screen TV make them aware of common man problems. As I always feel, why common is so common and common sense sounds so common because we ourselves decide to be in the mob of common people. We are happy with our daily busy life routines or rather we have developed our own ways and comfort zones to be satisfied. We crib for every little thing, we criticize every system but we don’t have enough courage to stand out of crowd and raise our voices.

Actually, we are also not at fault because in today’s corrupted environment we don’t even feel secure while complaining to police people also. Just think over the issue and your mind will come to a dead lock. But the problem is we think over these issues while puffing a holy smoke of cigarettes, while boozing with office colleagues or at dining table while or when we are relaxing and in a mood to talk some serious of intellectual stuff.

Pages will fall short if I will keep on writing over this issue but the problems will not come to end. So in this new era media advertisements of National level parties I can only end by saying “Jago Grahak Jago” instead “Jago Voter Jago”

Vishwani Dev