Monday, October 29, 2007

Vij vs Lead India contestant

As promised in the last post, this post is about a guy who volunteered to help me on Saturday. His name is Vij and working as a Sales Engineer with USD 30 bn organization. A localite and a resident of Magarpatta city. Before the incident we really didn’t meet and once hit by the rick wala the crowd gathered and I could see some 20-25 people. And when I decided to take the matter to the police, and was waiting for the police van to arrive and we spoke and exchanged cards and numbers.

Like an average Indian he could have seen the tamasha and learnt his lesson from my experience and left the scene as others did. But he chose not to. He chose to stick around be a witness to what he saw. On one hand we have people like Vij who rise up to the occasion, do what they can do and would like to be counted.

On the other we have this Lead India campaign going on with so much hype being created around it. FYI, they first roped in SRK for the campaign and may be they figured out that they not getting many female contestants and they roped in AB’s baby. Looks like things have not got any better and they had to openly advertise saying they need some 3 more female contestants for the campaign. Anyway, coming back to the original discussion, we have 3 people selected for the campaign from Pune and they will be TALKING and DEBATING with the contestants from other cities and then the states before they win the title.

I personally haven’t read or attended any of these sessions even though I wanted to but if you look at it, with all due respect to these people their thoughts, ideas and TOI, they are discussing about how to make India a better place to stay and what can make difference. Presuming Mr. X wins the grand prize, his photos are all over in TOI and they would have a networking dinner with all the politicos, local counselors will make desperate attempts to convince Mr. X to join their party and local MLA will promise something for him, if he joins the party, and give him a ticket also as a retention strategy (as we call in the corporate world) and he also gets elected. People like this go to state assembly/parliament remind me of Om Puri in Yuva. Tumhara pehle bhi idhar bahut log aaya, duniya badalne ke liye, kintu, Kuch bagh gaya, kuch khud badal gaya”. May be as time goes by they will become someone like the one Om Puri is talking about. I am not being pessimistic but I am focusing on one side of the coin in this case. The other side may be he might go on to become an excellent statesman.

Now X and Vij have two different styles of dealing with situations. Vij is one with courage and guts and believes in action rather than talk or strategize and X likes to write or talk more about the whole thing. X may be at the incident and would think something bad has happened to a fellow citizen and let me use mass media or paper as a tool to change the situation. But Vij thinks the need of the hour is doing what I can do “NOW” to change the situation. Vij may not be think like most of us think, like paper is read by a million people and unless I have some press relations or mass media relations I can’t make an impact. He thinks, this is my time and I will do my bit because everybody knows what impact newspaper and TV have on India and Indians. No one takes them seriously unless it is related to cricket, bollywood and now stock market. Vij, belongs to the group where he thinks like Aamir Khan in “Rang De Basanti” where he tells the listerners/callers
Zindagi Jeene ke do hi tarikke hoti hai, ek jo ho raha hi, hone do, bardasht karte jao, ye phir, jimmedari uthao, use badalneki

Vij took the 2nd route and so am I going to. Now it is time for you to decide

1 comment:

Ram said...

You said you are focusing on one side of the coin in this case.

:-) So I amn't arguing.