"Remember
Red…Hope is a good thing ... May be the best of things.... and no good thing
ever dies..."
These
lines from the movie Shawshank Redemption make an instantaneous connect
with something at our very core… something pure… something strong… something godly… something
magical…. something that everybody has… something that when evoked fills us with
a feeling of a quiet excitement…. a feeling of a humbled confidence and it surely is a great feeling. With what we have witnessed within the last year,
it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to associate the birth and emergence of the
Aam Aadmi Party with a similar feeling. It was somewhere among those multiple
protests for the Jan Lokpal Bill, among those visionary talks on Swaraj, among those press
conferences on exposing corrupt politicians & black money, among those accusations of trying to run a parallel
democracy, among those political stalwarts writing off AAP as premature, among
those desperate sting attacks and among those befitting replies from AAP that
it won the hearts of millions of Indians. The special part is, the support which AAP
enjoys comes not from an expectation to be paid… not from an expectation to be
nominated…. not from an expectation of receiving political favors, it comes from people’s respect for
themselves…it comes
from people’s love for their country… it comes from people’s wishes for their children to be able to live in a
better country. Referring to Maslow’s hierarchy, it's the hunger for
self-actualization manifesting itself in the form of support for AAP rather
than fulfillment of physiological and safety factors which are the general motivation factors
in case of political parties.
Well, whether they succeed or not remains to be seen. If they do, whether they deliver or not also remains to be seen. But we are desperate for a change and would like to see the fairy tale come true. I
hope they do well in the upcoming Delhi
elections but at the same time not look at it as a do or die situation. If they
get Delhi, well
and good. If not, doesn’t matter. They have to aim for a victory in the first
National Election of the next decade. That’s what we want. That’s what we want.
