On the camp-pain

Jug Suraiya

Chhotu: It's a tough job... being a politician and having to contest the elections.

Chhutku: That’s right.  We should be called poll-iticians because of all polls we have to contest.

Chhotu: And before we can even get to contest the polls, we have to get ourselves a party ticket to do so, which involves no end of ghoos and chaproosie, not to mention hera-pheri.

Chhutku: And that’s just the beginning of our woes.  Having got our party ticket, we then have to go on the campaign trail, as we’re doing right now.

Chhotu: Campaign trail?  More like a camp-pain trail, what with us have to rush about in our constituency, holding endless rallies, and having to camp out in the boonies which really is a pain.  How I miss the comforts of home and the ghar ka khanna my missus makes for me.

Chhutku: Me too. This campaigning is a real pain in the whatsis.  Sometimes I find myself holding 10-10 rallies in a single day.  

Chhotu: It is indeed most tiresome.  But what to do?  We have to mobilise voters and holding rallies is one of the ways of doing it.  Do your rallies draw huge crowds, like the rallies of big netas like Modiji and Rahulji are said to do?

Chhutku: Well, I won’t say my rallies draw huge crowds, exactly, but I do get a pretty good attendance.  My last rally attracted a record crowd of three little kids who mistook me for a jadugar who’d come to show them magic tricks, five stray cows, two street dogs, and IT unemployed youth who threw chappals at me because they didn’t have the money to buy even rotten tomatoes.

Chhotu: I hope you managed to duck the chappals in time.  I'm told that engaging the professional services of a company called ‘Rent a Crowd’ is a great help in these matters. But what with the limited campaign funds allotted to me, most of which I have to save for polling day to provide booze and cash inducements to voters, I've never been able to afford them myself.

Chhutku: Me neither. But at least now one chore associated with these public rallies is no longer necessary, thanks to growing environment awareness and the emphasis on recycling everything we can. 

Chhotu:I know what you mean.  Earlier, we had to spend a lot of time and effort writing different speeches which we’d make at our rallies, but now we simply recycle the same old speech over and over, promising progress, development, employment, blah, blah, blah.

Chhutku:Yup.  Recycling the same old speech for public rallies sure saves a lot of the paper on which we used to write all those speeches.  But I believe some of our colleagues are now using modern technology to make their rally speechifying, even more environmentally sound.

Chhotu: Really? How are they doing that?

Chhutku:Simple.  By recording the speech and playing it to the audience, over and over, thereby not only saving their tonsils from wear and tear but also reducing the amount of hot air that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere, adding to the pollution count and increasing the greenhouse effect.

Chhotu: How marvelous. Isn’t modern technology just wonderful?  

Chhutku: That it is.  And perhaps soon modern technology will devise robots to go on the campaign trail instead of us, and save us all the trouble of doing it ourselves.

Chhotu: But till then we’ve got to go through the grind.  The only good thing being that, if we do get elected, we can lie back and relax and not do a single darn thing for the next five years.

Chhutku: Or whenever the next election is called, and we have to go camp-paining again.

Chhotu: Oh well, I suppose every silver lining has a dark cloud…