This vintage Nazia Hassan song from the yesteryear Bollywood movie 'Qurbaani' has been reincarnated thanks to the surfacing of a new kid on the political landscape block in this glorious democracy called India where even the right to swing both ways is restricted by the judiciary and I’m not talking about the pendulum and simple harmonic motion.
They call themselves the AAM ADMI PARTY…Mango (AAM is incidentally Hindi for Mango too) is definitely an alternate to the banana republic we live in. Even though the likes of Arvind Kejriwal & co might not have given much thought while naming their party they have struck a gold mine in branding terms.
For the less initiated in Hindi not that I’m more initiated AAM AADMI PARTY means common man’s party. But the abbreviated version stole the show from day one. AAP was positioned in a way to identify itself with the ‘I’ generation, the irony being AAP on its own meant YOU in Hindi. So actually positioning ‘YOU’ in the ‘I’ generation can sound profound and at the same time can be an effective marketing ploy. And so it was. For all your ‘I’ gadgets to work one needed an AAP (phonetically speaking). Steve Jobs might have in some way contributed to an APP revolution with all his ‘I’ gadgets but Arvind Kejriwal has now a cult status with his own AAP. Move over the ‘I’ gen, ‘U’ is all set to take over.
Well actually my association with the word AAP started when Kejriwal was still a kid. Kejriwal’s school of thought might have been centred on AAP but my schooling itself was in an ‘aap’ school in Madras. Any school that was run by the erstwhile Anglo Indian community, who have contributed a great deal to education in India was generally referred to as an aap school, a name probably derived from the theory that aappam was sold by Anglo Indians in Royapuram. Though, it is now the malayalee’s claim to fame for a celebratory breakfast.
Aap had also a different connotation altogether in Madras Tamizh, which literally meant a peg / dowel but was used commonly and colloquially to represent a peg that was drilled up your you-know-where, and over the years was transformed into an euphemism for injustice being meted out in its crudest form. Well that is exactly what happened to the differently oriented citizens of India this week, literally and figuratively.
These final weeks of 2013 got the people of India dancing to the tunes of aap jaisa koi meri zindagi mein aaye (Somebody like YOU (AAP) make a difference in my life) but the judiciary had other ideas when they said ‘mere jaisa mere saath koi nahi!!!’ (No one like me with me anymore).
Welcome to the largest Democracy in the world!!!
Disclaimer: The above piece has been written in jest and not with an intention to hurt the feelings of people around me, I’m as over joyed by the advent of the AAP as an alternate option in Indian politics as I’m saddened by the curbing of the freedom of choice for the differently oriented people around me.
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