Is it enough for us to just vote?

  

Its election time and with the constant onslaught of propaganda by different political parties regarding their past achievements and future promises most of us have decided whom to vote for & whom not to vote for. Most of us support one political party or the other and show our liking for their leaders. Many of us have put forth our views about the leaders in various media. We are encouraged by various agencies through different media to register and vote during elections so that leaders of our choice get elected. We are asked to cast our vote and choose our leaders. We are told that our votes are very valuable and it can bring in change.

I want to ask whether these are enough.

• Are these your only obligations towards your country? Is it enough to bring in change that you want?
• Is it enough to express your love and admiration of political leaders and defend their various words and actions?
• Is it enough to just go to the polling booth on election day and cast your vote in favour of the political leader or party of your choice.
• Do you believe that the leaders you choose will solve all the problems all by themselves? Do you believe that one fine day a messiah in the form of a leader (political or religious) will come to your midst and solve all your problems? Why do even wait for one. Why can’t you do your own bit towards your country?
• Do you just choose a politician of your liking and follow them blindly with the belief that they can do no wrong. Do you treat your chosen politicians as gods who are infallible and are always right?
• Do you think that it is enough that you choose your leaders and let them run the ‘government’ and you carry on with your lives the way you want to?

If you answer YES to most of the questions above then wake up and get real. The truth is far from what most of you believe.

The leaders you choose had never come and will never come from some outer planet. They are from the same planet you live in and infact they are from amongst you. They are people who know very well how to excite and motivate you with their words and actions.

• Most leaders today are people who hardly care for you and would easily use you for their own motive and throw you after use.
• They believe in using or misusing the power and authority given to them as their birthright and prefer using the same for their own benefit. They do help others apart from their own selves but these others are people who may be either be related to them by blood or close friendship or may be someone who can be used.
• They eat up resources meant for the people.
• They give favours to their family members and friends. They take bribe, either directly or indirectly, in order to get things done for the person who is willing to pay the bribe.
• Now the above statements may appear to be clichéd (which infact are clichéd) and you may believe that people in power always behave in those ways.

Now take a look at your own behavior.

• Do you abide by all traffic rules – like driving in lanes, like driving within defined speed limits, like parking your vehicles in designated places only?
• Do you pay all your taxes, do you declare all your assets and pay taxes on them?
• Do you pay the exact electricity bill or try some ingenious methods to steal electricity or deactivate the electricity meter.
• Do you pay your public water supply bills or again try some methods steal water?
• Do you respect others rights and their convenience while parking your vehicle, entering the ATM, stopping the bus to get up or stopping it to get down wherever and whenever you like and away from the designated bus stoppage?
• Do you maintain queue while buying movie tickets, paying bills, going inside a hall, getting up a public vehicle?
• Do you like and favour all people of other communities, region, religion or people who do not speak the same language as yours?
• So you never paid a bribe, eh – bribing the traffic police to get away from being charged for traffic rule violation, bribing a peon to get your file to the top of the pile, etc. (Well I can go on but you must have got the point by now.)

If you had answered NO to most questions above I presume you must have thought or you must have justified your actions by saying –

• Why should I follow these rules when no one is following them?
• These are small issues and most of these do not hurt others. These are very different from the crimes committed by the politicians.

You may have felt depressed by all the problems around and must have said – ‘I cannot change this world.’

Some brutal truths that you may not like to think or accept consciously are-

• Unless we are forced by compulsion or ridicule we prefer to follow rules only to the extent of our convenience.
• We do not consider ourselves (or people known personally to us, to be law breakers and criminals even when proven guilty). If we do break laws we have our reasons and justifications which we would like others to believe. Laws are mainly broken by other people – mostly by people who are not known personally to us.

The basic point I want to make here is that if you do not behave properly, abide by all rules and regulations, respect others, you cannot expect your leaders to do them. Why should they behave differently from the people they represent? Just because they are leaders!!!  Our leaders reflect our own behaviours, the only difference being that they do it in a larger scale.

Like all the election campaigns asking you to make a difference by voting and telling you that each vote counts, you surely can make a difference. You do not need to change the world on your own. The world will change on its own if you change your behavior.