Everyone’s been encouraged to vote. keeping aside the fact that we don’t even have the right candidates to vote for, we don’t even have the right system in place to actually vote. mismanaged centers, long lines, incorrect and not updated electoral rolls, inefficient staff and voting machines that don’t work… the list is endless. Today, there were regular voters 60+ years of age, whose names were mixed up on the electoral rolls. The wrong picture was against the wrong name, with a third voting number. many regular voters had suddenly been bumped off the electoral roll. there was no methodical system in place. the people checking looked lost and didnt know how to handle the problems. the machines appeared like they were registering the vote, but one could never be sure.

And yet, I feel amazed and happy to see the elderly – people over 80+ years of age find their way to the polling stations to vote. The young, the old, the sick the healthy, the rich the poor, were all there. can’t something change to live up to their expectations?

60+ years of democracy, of voting, of advancement, of IT professionals, of outsourcing and this is what we have? Zero systems. I read an India Today survey that listed the fortunes of most politicians to be in the hundreds of crores. I don’t mean to sound skeptical, but really, they never possessed that kind of money when they started out. When will it stop? Should we outsource our ‘democracy’ to a dictatorship so that our peace of mind is once again held hostage? How does one change a system so rotten to the core that it infects anyone who comes near it? Politics is a disease in this country and we are all plagued by our own choices.