‘Velfies’ (Selfies of people who have voted) are the trend in India now. So here is mine. That little, blue-black, ink mark is put on the left, fore-finger of all who have voted in India’s 5-week election marathon. It is non-erasable and will stay there for the next 7-10 days. There are café’s that are promising customers 10% discounts on their bill, if they flash their inked fore-finger at the cash register. A small reward for being a ‘good’ citizen I suppose. Though I don’t know how they can tell if it’s really the election booth that has put that mark on the finger. Unfortunately, even ‘good’ citizens in India have the tendency to cheat, lie and steal!

Take my neighborhood for instance, full of ‘good’ upper-middle and upper class citizens, many of who were in the voting queue with me at 6.30 a.m., complaining about ‘bad’politicians. Now I know among them were some ‘good’ neighbors who happily pay the gas delivery man a little ‘bribe’ to deliver someone else’s gas to them, because they’ve run out of theirs. Who cares if that inconveniences the other people who have followed the rules, and made the effort to book their gas cylinder ahead of time! Or the odd way my land-phone connection, and the broad band that comes with it go dead and don’t get fixed for 10 days, during which time some other ‘good’ neighbor has paid a little bribe to the phone service man to connect my line to their house. So at the end of the month, I get a massive phone bill for a connection that was dead for half the month! And then there are plenty of ‘good’ neighbors who never bother to buy a cable connection because they know some wise guy who hijacks someone else’s for them for a small fee.

It’s not that people in my neighborhood cannot afford cable, gas, phone, or internet. Most of them shell out 4-5 times what they’d have to pay for the monthly cable fee, for one dinner outing (more…)