The results to the parliament elections will be known in a couple of hours. Just a short note here to record my appreciation of how lucky I am to be living in a democracy. If I were born in China (for e.g, or North korea or Saudi Arabia ... ), I would probably have gone to the wall long ago.
Even with all its ills and the wrong people winning sometimes (e.g Mr Shashi Tharoor, an audacious carpetbagger, is leading in my home constituency as I write this. Ugh!), democracy is still the best system in the world and I am blessed to live in one!
PS:Still many things to improve. Web coverage of the elections is abysmal. The Election Commission's website crashed. They run the site on IIS/ WinXP (!!!).
ravimohan wrote "I'll go out on a limb here and predict that Mr T will lose badly in the 6 way contest. "
ReplyDeletehihihihi....Kkkkrrrraaaakkkkk snaps the limb.Tthhhhhudddd falls mohan !
Don't worry, Iodex lagao aur kaam pe chalo.
@anonymous,
ReplyDeleteYou are right!
my "prediction" went awry as it possibly could!
In my defense I did say "go out on a limb" - another way of saying "I am not good at politics, but will go ahead and make a prediction anyway" - which is a better altenative t playing it safe and not saying anything definite :-)
Democracy grants even political tyros like me the right to make predictions on their own blogs, even when time proves them wrong , as has happened here!
That said, I still think Mr T ought to have lost.
72000 more people thought he should have won than lost. That's how democracy works. I am completely fine with that.
And then, there is a next time, somewhere around 2014. :-D (which is another good thing abut a democracy - there is always "round 2" )
The net coverage is really bad but the T.V coverage is just astounding and this when i am not even in India.
ReplyDeleteSnazzy graphics,on-the-spot reporters, statistics , exit polls.. now if only they could tone down the reporters a bit ., all of them bar none seem to be constantly shouting.
@venkatesh,
ReplyDeleteThe problem with TV coverage (vs a vote tracking website) is that you as a consumer of news can't constantly focus on *a* constituency (or a set of constituencies) you are interested in. You have to wait for the reporter to mention the latest news on the particular constituencies you are interested in.
While tracking the last US presidential elections, for e.g, I could choose to just "watch" Florida (say) and get up to the minute updates.
As I mentioned in my blog entry, the Elecytion Commission of India's web site crashed early (and it turns out they don't have interesting data anyway, just a list of who won where (not even number of votes polled)!
True true ., its couch potato consumer(TV) vs. interactive consumer(internet)., i can mould the news or sports or any other coverage to exactly what i want in the latter medium.
ReplyDeleteThough to be fair, there are now some levels of interactiveness with TV.