Wednesday 24 July 2013

Post-Election Stress Syndrome

Ladies queueing up to cast their vote

Bhutan went to the polls on July 13, 2013 and voted to power the opposition – People’s Democratic Party (PDP). The erstwhile ruling party – Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT) will be the reluctant shadow to the government.
An election often brings out major changes. If the incumbent party returns to power, there won’t be major changes. However, major changes can be expected if the opposition who has been baying for blood for the last 5 years wins an election. After all, nothing can affect the citizenry more than a change in government.
Politicians are wont to make promises and pledges during the electioneering period. Sometimes, it sounds and reads like a competition of who can promise louder, never mind the do-ability and implementability of pledges. The newness and relevance of the pledges provide the clues for change. 
The Bhutanese electorate is maturing rapidly, but it is still naïve and emotion laden. This is evident from the victory it handed out to DPT in the primaries and the drubbing it bestowed on the ruling party in the general elections – both within a time period of about six weeks. Ever heard of a better voter swing?
No matter who wins an election, the counting of the ballot is usually followed by emotional let down and explosive reactions. The shaping up of events after July 13 must be seen in this light. How politicians react and behave after the final results separate the leaders from the rest. In such cases, the opposite of leader is not follower. When all followers vie for the limited leadership space, both the leader and his followers behave more like a pack of hungry hyenas. Just like the loud-mouthed animals that move in packs and eat rotten, the vanquished in an election start laughing (i.e crying) very loudly. The idea is to gather all the like-minded together and try and snatch the kill from the tiger! It is a common and basic advise that if you want to be a leader you got to act like one. You can’t act like a hyena and aspire to be the lion. 
The moment after the ballots are counted can be overwhelming to many, especially the aged, the over-involved, and the self-perceived invincible. It is then that we hear of highly prophetic views as, ‘the unimaginable happened’. Anyone who cannot imagine his own defeat is least prepared for victory. He reeks of arrogance and is highly impolite to his opponent who beat him.
Actually you don’t fault politicians for the way they behave and communicate after losing an election. They are struck by, what psephologists and behavioral scientists call the ‘Post-Election Stress Syndrome. The disease seems to renders losers quite incapable and depraved of the grey matter in the aftermath of an election.
Within a short span of democratic traditions, Bhutan has already experienced a highly stressful election because of numbing news fatigue and continual media over-exposure. Yet, one worries that the real problems may be yet to come. Personal anxiety, professional panic and poorly thought out decisions may be on the horizon regardless of the campaign period high mood.
The heat is yet to subside and the dust has not fully settled on Bhutan’s second parliamentary elections. Has it taken rather long?  The day after tomorrow on the auspicious nineteenth day of the sixth month of the water female snake year, His Majesty the King will formally pronounce Tshering Tobgay as the second prime minister of democratic Bhutan by offering the sacred dakyen. Soon after that, the cabinet will be announced and the new government will be raring to go. One hopes that the reluctance of the DPT to sit as the opposition party will have fully dissipated by then and that it will be ready to support PDP to steer our land into the next strategic 5 years. The PDP, DPT, you, I, and indeed all the Bhutanese people will have a role to play. We are a team and together everyone achieves more!

Wednesday 27 March 2013

Parents, Nature and the Future...


My two boys with their cousins Adeep & Eshan
I often take long evening walks with my wife and our two children. We are proud parents of two young boys aged eight and four years. As parents we often worry about them – their education, desires and ambitions and the values they learn. I wonder about what my eight year old son thinks when we go on such walks or what rummages through the mind of my four year old. 

On one such evening walk the sky was slightly overcast with a smattering of white and grey clouds over long patches of blue. My elder son pointed to the blue in the distant sky and asked me, “dad, what is that?” I encouraged him to find the answer by himself. “Think about it”, I told him. After a few seconds he answered, “Sea”!

My wife merely smiled at him. As a doting young mother, she neither wanted to correct her son nor wanted to reprimand him for being silly. I took up the job and explained to my son that the blue in the sky was nothing but sky itself. He looked at me with disbelief. He wrinkled his brows and looked one more time at his ‘sea’. Taking the geography lesson further, I told him that seas are a meeting place for many rivers. Bhutan is a landlocked mountainous country and the majority of its people have not seen a sea. To people living in the mountains, seas are in the sky, in the tiny imagination of a child or even the matured fantasy of an adult.  

“Where is the sea, then?” my son continued. “Can we go to see one?” I drew an impromptu map on the footpath and showed him where we were as a country. “Look, this country south of us which looks like a taproot is India. And on the shores of India we can find the sea”.

I remember the first time I actually touched seawater was when I was attending an international training programme on rural development at Pataya, Thailand. I think it was the South China Sea. As I cupped up some water in my hands I had been disappointed. The water in my hand was not blue but grey, brown and dirty. “Where is the blue sea?” I had wondered as I surveyed the coast of the polluted sea.

In the mountains we feel much closer to nature and everything that comes with it – worms, insects, beetles, butterflies, birds, animals, grass, bush, trees and mountain after mountain. In my country religion is a way of life and mountains are everywhere; where one mountain ends another one begins. And religion and nature have a common path and a peaceful co-existence. We name our mountains and highlands after gods and goddesses. Gods and goddesses in turn protect our mountains, passes, valleys and the wild. There is a reverence between man and nature!

In Bhutan going on a picnic means sharing food with the birds and the monkeys. I often feel sorry for the many men, women and children around the world who have not seen a tree in the wild, touched a beetle as it claws its way out of the dung, seen a bird carry twigs to build a nest on the areca nut tree, or fed rice husks to the tiny tadpoles and school of fish in the mountain streams.  

My son is in standard III. He has seen nature from a close range. He has heard nature in its natural tone not just through the narrations in the National Geographic channel. He has seen monkeys jump from tree to tree and not squeak in tiny rusted iron cages in the zoos. He has seen birds fly about in full regalia and not merely flap their wings at the call of the jester in the park. He has even seen a snake when one crossed our path on our way back home after visiting my sister in the village. Last December I took him on a vacation to the neighbouring Indian town. There we saw a motley crowd gathered around a bearded man playing on his gourd pipe and a grey snake slithering around in apparent dance steps. My son was scared of the snake and terrified of the charmer.  

However, my son has not seen the world. His world begins at home and ends at his school classroom. He has recently been introduced to map reading as a part of his environmental studies. He now knows that there are many more countries besides Bhutan. He recognizes the map of North America when I show him a slightly flattened photocopied version of the map; for that is how his teacher introduced the map in the class. He finds it hard to understand that in many parts of the world people drink water from a bottle. He finds it amusing that cows in other parts of the world deliver condensed, powdered or packaged milk for he has seen the cows in our village give white and delicious liquid.

Lately, my elder son has started showing interests in news and current affairs. As with most child of his age, he watches a lot of television. Although Cartoon Network with its myriad of characters and Pokemons is his favourite, he often ventures into Natural Geographic and Animal Planet. At times he is compelled to sit over BBC and CNN with me. He finds an analogy in much of what is shown, be it CNN or Animal Planet. “In your news I see that people are killing other people. In Animal Planet, I find one animal killing another”. He looks at me. I know he is looking for an answer.

Today my son cornered me again. He asked me, “dad, what is earthquake?” I said “earthquake is a shaking of the earth…” He folded his tiny eyes, looked at me curiously and asked, “How does it happen?” Now, I have forgotten my twelfth standard geography except for the formation of an oxbow lake. “Don’t worry”, I said, “you will learn about it in your class five or six...” He was not convinced. He wanted to know then and there. I was caught on the wrong side of my intelligence. This was not the first time either. He did it the day-before when he wanted my analysis on the content of the TV channels. Within 72 hours he caught me napping twice. How long can this pretension go? How far can I be a hypocrite? How long do I pretend to be a walking enclyclopaedia??  I quickly gathered my composure and said, “I don’t know. I have forgotten the details…”  

I know he was not satisfied with my stance. I have a feeling that from that day he has begun to realize that his old father doesn’t know everything after all. To an eight year old, his father is the epitome of knowledge and a reservoir of answers. Last month when my son asked me a question and I was unable to answer, he had remarked quite dryly: ‘didn’t your teacher teach you about this?” At his age he is able to find answers to most things that he needs to know from his teachers. He would expect that I would have been taught everything by now. I think at the end of the day, it is better for your son to realize that his father is no know-all fellow. I feel much better since the day I decided to give up.