An Anti-Climatic Vote

At 7AM this morning, Britain began its mammoth excercise...The process of Voting a new government in...Now, I was wondering why today, I chose to post on the British elections and not the death sentence given to Kasab? I was in Mumbai covering the 26/11 siege - watching the Taj burning up-close and personal.. So there is definitely a sense of closure for me, though I am not naive to imagine that this sentence would mean that tomorrow he would be made to pay for the terror he and his now-dead partners unleashed on Mumbai.

But today, I dedicate some time to the British elections. The election seemed to me like a staid grand aunt of the flashy American Presidential elections...While the whole world had put aside considerable media space and discussion time to Obama's historical ascendancy to power, except in the UK, there seems hardly much interest in the election of a new government..

Frankly speaking, across Britain too, I hardly see much excitement....Between current PM Gordon Brown, Lib- Dem leader Nick Clegg and the blue-eyed boy of the Tories, David Cameron - they tried whipping up some interest...Three head-to-head debates relayed on national television was pretty well-watched, with the leaders proving to be good orators who gave as good as they got. But like British films which seem like poor step-sisters of flashy Hollywood, Browleggameron's ( that's my term for their combined crowd-pulling power) box-office skills are hardly anything to write home about...

So here's my personal experience...About a month ago, I got a registration slip by mail, that seemed to audaciously suggest to me that I am a Registered Voter in Britain....My first impulse was to junk it in the rubbish bin along with other spam mails...And then, I took a closer look..wait it said my polling booth is a building inside the campus and they had my name and address right...With my mouth in a little O, I walked back home wondering which schizophrenic self of me had applied for a British citizenship for them to notify me as a registered voter...

And then I found out most of my friends had also received it...The feeling of self importance, deflated sufficiently, I went about figuring out how we became eligible to vote in the General Elections that will decide who will form the next government...The answer: We all belonged to the erstwhile Pax Brittanica...now the Commonwealth..So the Canadians and the Indians and the Malaysians and the Zimbabweans were all empowered by 'our country of a year' to vote in their leaders...Foreigner when it came to paying to the category in which we pay University Fees or apply for student visas, but important enough to be bestowed the 'honour' of participating in voting in a new government!!

Silly, isn't it? Considering that we aren't going to be around to bear the fruits of our 'labour'....but then I would be exaggerating, calling it labour...There were no long lines anywhere...most polling booths have roughly between 200-500 people registered to vote there..Like the BBC informed me, Some were in pubs - practical idea, isn't it? Imagine heading to the pub after work, taking two minutes to cast your ballot and then drinking to a vote cast....Hmmm..wonder how that would work in India if polling booths were to be set in the toddy and arrack shops...I can imagine a lot of drunkards sitting out, 'exhausted' from the effort of hanging around the 'polling booth'!!!

I Voted....What are the odds of being in a country in the year of General Elections and having your registration card delivered to you - limiting your effort to participate in the democratic process to walking five minutes to a polling booth set up in a university building and walking out about 30seconds later - ballot cast!!! The ballot paper looked like the ones printed at college elections, with a stubby graphite pencil dangling on the side of the booth...No EVMS here...No standing in queues in hot hot sun...no having indelible ink marking your finger for nearly two months post the elections or in my particular case, running behind politicians at their polling booth for lame sound bites saying 'We are confident of coming to power!!!'

I am sitting up through the night, watching an exemplary BBC coverage - measured and prim like the English - for unlike in India where the counting day is different from the polling day...the counting here is right after polling stops at 10PM!!

Interesting indeed....for me, it's a small slice of historic memorablia for me...

Statistics:

No. of times that I have voted in India - One ( Not proud of it,mind you, but when you are a journalist covering General Elections since the time I turned of legal age to vote, you will find yourself in Gondia or rural Andhra Pradesh on voting day, while your vote is in a small school in little Kochi)

No. of times voted in UK - One

The Statistics have a very skewed way of saying a story doesn't it?

P.S I just heard that I have been part of a historic vote that voted the first MP in for Green Party from Brighton!!

Wordsworth's Daffodils

My Sony Ericsson P1i has been my constant companion over the last two years....And every day these days, as I walk down from my University residence towards the Library or my class, it quietly pops out of my pocket and nudges me to use it to capture how beautiful my campus looks, fresh out of its winter slumber....

Some of you might have seen the glorious snowscapes that I had put out in December last year....Now it's time for the Spring Collection....

 

I'm sure this is the sight that inspired Wordsworth two centuries back to write his wonderful poem Daffodils...

I wander'd lonely as a cloud 

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd, 

A host, of golden daffodils; 

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine 

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line 

Along the margin of a bay: 

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they 

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay, 

In such a jocund company: 

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie 

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye 

Which is the bliss of solitude; 

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

P.S The Morning After...My Snow White Countryside...

I went to sleep at about 2 AM...But was wide awake by 8AM, stole a glance outside the window, and had my mouth turn a big O at the sight that greeted me... I promised you pictures with a P.S And here they are... I'm snowed in, just heard that my friends were caught in 4 hour traffic jams while I was cavorting in the snow...That's how unprepared the Brighton and Hove City Council is for snowfall...Like they kept warning me, it hardly snows in Brighton..So literally no contingency plan. I wonder if the only option is to wait for the snow to melt and flow away... The white rooftops, the red brick cottages... You have seen this tree before...In autumn and later without any leaves in winter...And this is how it looks on a snow-covered December morning... I'm off to sleep some more...In my warm toasted room...under my thick duvet...Its still snowing outside... So surreal, I tell you...Wouldn't want to miss it for anything... Here's to spreading the wintry cheer....

The Story He Told

Being on the University during the breaks is like being in a Ghost town...the deathly silence unnerves you...makes you feel as if you are the last human being left on earth as Armageddon approaches... So to ward off holiday blues....two strapping women from two parts of the globe...one from the Pacific Island of Tonga..and another from a coastal city in India set out to explore the boundaries of the campus we live on....The idea was to take a brisk walk and work out the excess lard that the winter insists on layering us up with....But little did we know, it would be turn out to be a story in itself.... Off we went, huffing and puffing our way up the uphill trail, past the gymnasium (nothing can make me enter one, I'd rather walk my calories off!!) when we spotted the vast expanse of meadows...Acres and acres of it... stretching all the way yonder... And just as we turned the corner, we came across one of those old English cottages....wait..it wasn't a cottage...but a corn barn... Curiousity indeed got the better of us, and though somewhere, both of us knew that this can't be public thoroughfare, we decided to indulge our curiousity....walking along the old building, that did seem abandoned....We turned another corner and realised that there was indeed a very very old cottage nestled behind the barn...

And that's where I met my story teller....An old English gentleman, clearly lonely...happy to have a conversation with two freezing but very inquisitive young women - who were clearly trespassing across his property....So we put on our best smiles and apologised for stumbling through his land...And when our politeness was returned with some cheery conversation, we pressed on...asking about the old barn that had caught our attention.... It was over a hundred years old...just like I'd imagined it would be..Our friend ( despite my asking him twice, he never told me his name..wonder if that was deliberate?) interrupted his afternoon walk long enough to tell us how the barn was very important to store the corn that was grown in the land by the meadows.... There were atleast a couple of huge barndoors...one was still in great shape...the other had been replaced...and depending on the direction that the wind blew in, one was opened, so that the chaff could be beaten away from the corn and the husk could be blown away....And just outside the barn, there was enough space for the animals of the barn to be tethered.... Even more interesting was this hand pump...Now old and disused for atleast half a century I imagine.... Just by the pipe was a broken cover to a well...and look closely, by the spout, you can see a hole...that's the opening to a tank that served water to the barn....So when it poured, water gathering in the tank could be let out through here into the well near the pump...and when the tank went dry, the handpump would be used to draw water and fill the tanks so that the barn animals could drink their fill.... I closed my eyes for a moment, and I could picture the scene...straight out of a John Constable painting....like one of my all time favourites...The Hay Wain.. The English cottage, with its own barn and animals....and the men and women letting the barn doors open while storing the corn grown in the fields nearby inside...letting the wind help winnow the chaff from the grain... But our friend was not done with his story yet....He had moved into this house about 60 years ago...just after the Second World War....and he spoke about how this countryside had been taken over by the Army during Wartime.. This tree, that now stands gnarled and old in the winter, he said had once been young...He remembered it in its glorious youth...His voice was robust, but you couldn't miss the nostalgia...He took pleasure in getting us to guess his age...We were off the mark by about a decade... He was 83, and clearly enjoying reliving his memories of the War for us...He had served in the Army himself...talking about how the guns were lined up in rows by the trees near his land...pointing out where the young soldiers were asked to fire across the meadows for target practise... Later apparently he had a chance to see a 'bit of the world too'...Egypt and Palestine, he said...much before you were born, he joked with me.. Then he smiled that wistful smile at us...as he spoke about how time seemed to have just flown by...He shared little about his life or family....but when we wished him Merry Xmas...he brushed it away saying the season wasn't special anymore...He was more like the Scrooge of Christmas... Our hearts ached...It can't be fun to be old and lonely....living alone on a property as old as time itself....Though he repeated that he loved the isolation that his property offered, I doubt if I was convinced.. I don't know his name...I wonder if he will remember me if I look him up in a week or so...I don't even know if I will have anything to converse with him about.....But by giving us a peek into the history that lies sleeping in this land, he did give me a wonderful story....a wonderful memory..... ( P.S : I have discovered that my mobile phone camera gives me pretty decent picture resolution..So till the time that I hoard up for a new camera, my mobile phone shall be put to good use..:)