Challenging the audience

A year or so ago I was invited to participate to be part of a play reading . The play was a hindi translation of a  Kannada play by the renowned Kannada play wright, "Sri Ranga" . Well getting to the point. The play kind of put the audience in a spot by talking about extra-marital affairs (I kind of oversimplified for the sake of brevity) , especially back then when the Indian society was a bit more orthodox. It challenged and defied the audience by showing a married lady talking to three different men , including her husband , and telling them how each of them fulfilled her different needs, (intellectual , emotional , platonic and others) . Certainly a brave script to write in the  20th century India.

This brings me to the second part of the post, something which I learned / realized over the last week . I put in my name for the chair of Consulting OBN (it's a school group for students interested in consulting as a career) . I talked to a number of people and asked them to read my pitch and let me know how they found it (even if they didn't vote for me) . Most of the people who I talked to gave me a very good piece advice , "Get more face time" , "Get more exposure to class" . This makes a lot of sense , because very few people, if any, would vote for somebody they don't know. But that brings me to my key observation . It's imperative that the person up for election makes himself / herself visible. But , how many of us voters take the pain of knowing the people up for election . Isn't it imperative for us to put in the effort to know the right candidate instead of being passive and vote for the guy we have heard of ? Isn't this a partnership ? The way it is currently , it seems that the candidate has everything to gain from getting elected and hence puts in all the effort, and the voters have nothing to gain from it, which is not true by any stretch of imagination. Wouldn't it be better if in all elections, especially which decide fates of our countries, we put in some effort to get to know the candidates and not wait for them to come to us. Lets make it similar to a job interview where both the interviewer and the interviewee have a stake in the process and hence put in an effort to help each other find the right match. Unfortunately I myself have been one of the guilty ones. I am ashamed to say that I have never voted for any elections, and it took me to stand up for election to understand the gravity of my folly.

I believe we should use our vote , wherever we have a say, else we end up choosing the person with the best PR rather than the best abilities. I hope I did make sense, if not drop me a message and we can discuss this further online or a cup coffee :)