Emotions and Elections

Come elections, and the intensity of his grief over the ‘Wa’ade Karin’ of politicians during their electoral campaigns—and the ‘Thaz thawin’ after winning it—just increases tenfold. He’s breathing, living his life, but palms on head; he curses the regional state of affairs.

“Kashmiris are remarkable for valuing emotions more than anything else; they have been fed on emotions, they live their life through its landscape, and they bury themselves with it.” In a fit of anger, a statement came from nowhere. What a tragedy the person thought; his own life, seeing from the summit, has been one big emotional tapestry itself.  He gives less weight to logic and more to feelings. It scares him to think how much he has suffered owing to this game of playing emotionally: too naïve to think through the possible scams, he once deposited money to some unknown bank in hopes of finding it triple, only to find he had trusted something that turned out to be a blatant lie. Money gone and expectations torn apart.

“Do emotions contribute to making a not-so-efficient leader? Do feelings apply in this domain as well?” A person asks this question to himself in wonder abandon. He’s now reflecting on occasions when people turned hysterically mad supporting a leader, leading to verbal clashes or otherwise between two different political parties. He’s immersed in the words that his neighbour once said to him: “I have chosen this leader; for once, a decade ago, he proposed such and such a thing, and ‘I have failed to account for what he has been doing ever since.’”

Emotions attached to one goddamn thing, and rationality either dies or takes a back seat.

Realising this to be a grave situation and something that needs to be changed, the person asks nowhere, “I got it; what should be done to atone for whatever we have incurred out of our naivety?” “Mental exercise,” came the reply, and voices from nowhere stopped coming.  Mental exercise…hmmm. We should be able to check the history of a leader we are choosing in minute detail: the mistakes he made and the measures he took to rectify them; the difference between what he said during elections and after it; whether he stood by the destitute or not; was accountability given a priority in his previous tenure or not...

Emotions leave us handicapped; let’s apply our mental exercise to would-be leaders galore, popping up here and there, and check how far our analysis could go. These stood the final remarks of the person before disappearing into thin air. A piece of advice at best.