Our Flawless Heroes

It was difficult to point that one thing that people loved about him. Was it the stunning good looks, the dimpled smile or the fair colour of the skin (still considered an asset in Indian consciousness)? Was it the fact that he was a pilot (the dream job of a middle class Indian in the 1980's) or that he had married an European ( fairy tale love stories happened only in movies then)? . That he became a popular mass leader within a short span of time of entering public life was without debate. Of course the charisma of the Gandhi surname played its role. The children loved him, the youth wanted to emulate him and the middle aged envied him for he was everything that they wanted to be.


He had such an impact on the collective consciousness of the nation that no one even questioned his inexperience in politics before accepting him as the leader of the nation. It is amazing how we crave for the perfect leader, hoping that he would lead us to a new world where we would have everything that we wanted but were too weak to achieve, turning a blind eye to the weakness that make him human, ignoring the flaws and finding virtues where there are none. The powerful visual media has made it easy to create such heroes. Anyone who has sufficient coverage, speaks the right words and connect with the audience has a good chance. The good looks add a further punch sending the TRPs soaring.
And very often we have seen them fall as fast as they rise. The congress under Rajiv won the maximum number of seats in any parliament in Indian history and plumetted to its lowest number of seats in the very next election under the same leader. Obama's rise is probably as meteoric as Rajiv and within a year the fall in his ratings is amongst the highest.

So what's behind the phenomenon that enables such leaders to sway the voters into a mass hysteria? One explanation could be that these leaders are very good at understanding the weakness of the human spirit and exploiting the same to their benefit. They are good at selling dreams to the vast population which promise to relieve them of their miseries and take them to a better world, tugging at their heart strings with slogans like 'change we need'. The citizens, most of whom are fighting a losing battle with lost jobs or high mortgages, are only too willing to buy the smooth talk while deliberaletly ignoring the fact that they have to solve their lives problems themselves. The reality is too harsh and the world of dreams provides a relief from the wretchedness of a losers life.

The dream reaches its euphoria with the results of the elections announced and the public waiting for the messiah to perform the miracles they promised themselves he will. The reality dawns slowly as unpaid bills pile up and with it the anger of disillusionment crashing the ratings to the ground.