Candidates and Circuses

These days, you simply can't sink your teeth into juicy gossip in the papers

Candidates and Circuses

These days, you simply can't sink your teeth into juicy gossip in the papers. Over your morning coffee, it's just impossible to concentrate on the Vietnamese killers, the Vapid Miss Indias or the Venomous ex-wife who slew her husband's throat.

Every second column of print has been taken over by the election fever.

Going by the list of assets each candidate has professed publicly, they all seem to be hovering just above the poverty line.

If people like Mayawati, Jayalalitha and The G Family lived in the US, they would qualify for Social Security and Soup Kitchens.

One can only pity these poor, poor selfless leaders and hope they get their next square meal after all they've done so much for the country.u00a0u00a0

The glittering trophy for the most popular Nobody To Notorious Award for Elections 2009 has to belong to Feroze Varun Gandhi.

An overweight, overgrown teen who thought a famous last name would allow him to get away with anything.

His rants and raves ensured that even amongst all the frenzy, he elbowed all the seasoned players aside and endless moments of precious paparazzi time was spent analyzing his every lip movement.

His subsequent retractions, his succeeding distractions and his mother's slanging match with Madame Mayawati, have ensured that he displaced even the swimsuit round of the Miss India pageant off the main stories. (And if you consider all the hard work that stellar people like Sandip Soparkar and Meher Castellino had put in to get those bathing beauties so perfectly poised on the ramp, then you'll truly understand how Varun has unfairly hogged the limelight - along with those alloo paranthas that he is supposedly eating in jail.)

Closer home, people seem to be divided on who they want to be in power you have a choice of the worse and the worst. Things never seem to improve, irrespective of who is in power.

Land gets grabbed, the deadlines get shorter, the traffic and infrastructure steadily get worse, and corruption is headed in the same direction as the recession: upwards.

A walk on any Bangalore street will see everybody from the average software czar to a Sampangiramnagar shopkeeper bemoaning the fate of the city.

"Those were the days.." seems to have replaced "swalpa adjust maadi" as the anthem of the native Bangalorean.

And just another meaningless ballot doesn't count so much as an urgent shot of adrenalin that Bangalore desperately needs.

Candidates, anyone?u00a0

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