It has been an ambience of merriment and grief over the last few days. The merriment mostly has to do with the state of affairs at home. The grief has to do with the affairs of my home State.

AP is turning into a cesspit of anarchic madness and I am an unwilling audience to the wave of mass hysteria that has engulfed it. I say unwilling because I want to be in it. I want to experience the madness firsthand...and not the helpless madness of the common people, but the wild opportunistic excitement that the politicians are experiencing right now! This is the time to exploit the highly tragic death of a great leader. The battle over succession is making headway in a riveting and comically muddled manner. I can’t seem to work out if all the clowning around in the name of decision-making is our way of taking politics seriously. Perhaps it is…or perhaps it inadvertently takes us on the (right) path of decision-making “in spite of” all the clowning around. We are now where we “wait and watch” but we are not waiting passively of course! God knows what we are watching... which is why I want to be in it!

When you are just a spectator to the events unfolding around you, it is a bit like believing in God and destiny. You know that your State’s future and the development of events thereupon is beyond your control, even though you are contributing to it in some way. A force of agency that is invisible to you usually predetermines what ensues, but you feel the need to have a say in this process. You want to address whatever dictates this inevitable series of events, but you don’t even know if it is a person, thing or supernatural being. NT Rama Rao for instance never quite revealed who or what he was! He arrived on earth as a black and white messiah dressed in a costume of a divine being; and took flight in color wearing an oversized superhero outfit. Somehow throughout all this, while we were watching him dance stiffly but charmingly with a vulnerable damsel half his age, he founded a political party and shaped the character of the State like we had never imagined!

I have decided therefore that I am a political agnostic. I claim neither faith nor disbelief in politicians. It is impossible to know whether there is such a thing as a good, well-meaning politician. If there is such a politician, it is impossible to know if he has complete understanding of what might be good for us, for there is no single correct solution to any political situation. Your best bet then is to BE the politician with an agnostic belief in yourself!

So far this uncertainty has worked in my favor. When chaos calls, bedlam abounds and brings with it some good, some bad, some opulence and loads of penury. There is balance in the world, and it seems to be tilted in my favor. I am where I feel for my State but am safely removed from it, so nothing about it affects me adversely.

Even so, it is only when a great calamity occurs, or a leader passes away that you notice how “soundly” people who are far removed from it choose to express their shock or grief. There are ardent enthusiasts who see YSR as a tall leader, an uber secular man of ideas, who undertook unprecedented projects of rural restitution. Then there are those who don’t want t see beyond his corruption and exploitation of power for personal gain. Their tribute to him is filled with blasphemy.

But, the thing that bugs me most throughout all this is not people’s adverse criticism for the political scenario in AP but the cynicism for the future. All discussions on “what now” seem to be wrought with great bitterness for “what has been” and “what is” on a very shallow level. A few disparate statistics and facts are thrown here and there - all pulled out of context, distorted, misconstrued, simplified and then blown out of proportion! But there seems to be no discussion on "what must" happen! Somehow our intellect terminates right after we pan, pummel, roast and tear apart our government. Who is going to eat the shredded and barbecued feast?

We have already made it amply clear that our politics is murderous! It is rife with caste wars and ideological struggles. It is studded with benighted stars who may be unenlightened intellectually or morally! This has been the case since time immemorial, but we continue to be baffled by this and keep bringing these nutters to power. But so far a lot of good has come out of it, and that we must not deny.

But, YSR is neither an incompetent nutter nor an unenlightened intellectual. He was a tough man who knew what he was doing and so did we. His election campaign rested solely on the continuity of projects he had undertaken in his previous tenure. He had no free TV and laptop schemes. His portfolio has been relatively impressive. The triumph of Congress recently was mostly his triumph. The support for him was like nothing the nation had seen in over four decades. It speaks for our approval of his previous efforts and faith in his leadership – something the Grand alliance failed to secure. He fought against odds of anti-incumbency and an almost unified opposition. The naxal movement saw a peak and a trough during his tenure and has remained at the trough point for sometime now. That in itself is a huge achievement. 

I want therefore to be able to ignore the denigrating remarks about his corruption and understand what about him prompts the glowing tributes that we have been witnessing over the past few days. What did he get right about our needs and what do we think we need!

“Doom” which is the constantly agreed upon prediction of our States future, seems to be eluding us somehow! I want to understand how we have managed this.

For now, I am thoroughly perplexed at the lack of clear procedures to facilitate the succession process and yet everything seems to happen involuntarily in a frenzied hurry. There is all this talk on how parties will choose to harness the emotion turbulence caused by YSR’s death to their advantage in the short and long term. In the mean time, there is Rosaiah and Jagan Reddy representing conflicting paradoxes within the same party. The topic of current interest is what it takes to be a good politician!

Here, we speak of the ideology of legacy, which is being tested to its limit. Is it the legacy of the Congress, or of YSR, is it of stability or of change? Do we need an old wizened politician or a young dynamic one; and do Rosaiah and Jagan Reddy rightly represent these two types or will their common link of egocentricity and dishonesty supplant this delineation.

This whole thing has got me thinking not about what we want of our future. I can hardly get a grip on what it takes to run a State and here I am wondering what I would look at when choosing a political party or a leader to assume responsibility and lead us in the direction of progress. Maybe I ought to think beyond my own life which is so removed from the real affairs of the State. I am so blind to the real identify of my State because I am not seeking to discern its identity, but looking to identify with it somehow. I put myself in it, but I am not its real denizen. When I speak of it, I speak as if I am an outsider, analyzing the government's rights and wrongs on issues I know little about, feel little empathy for, because they don't directly affect me. I know that if it doesn't work in my favor, I can have out! What meaning then does my pride or pessimism have for my State? And if it has little meaning, maybe I should stick to just feeling pride? Perhaps that will bring me closer to home?