A lot of my posts in the past have been about elections and here I am, in yet another round of the same thing! But looking across almost 10 year old posts now.. its like watching your life, yourself in a film.. or some kind of an experimental study of personality across time..
The same things which confounded me ten years ago, excited me five years ago, borders on been-there-done-that today. Almost makes me feel like a grandparent of sorts in this business. And when you reach this stage, the things that excited you earlier, now seem juvenile or amateurish, like a child in a candy store.
But being in a new place, in many ways, slightly more challenging than the earlier ones, the things that take up maximum attention is so different. A small town with not many visitors was easy in the sense that you had to focus more on your own work and bother relatively less about who's coming and going and what they are doing while they are in your area.. This time the most challenging thing was exactly this..
The three biggies were all here, and for extra kick, all within the same 24 hours! And of course, the very same day got packed with all the other action the stars could muster! 6 am, commissioning work started and at 8 am a tragic loss of life and politics over the body, 10 am some statutory work which received which was objected to by someone who had no business to (and had to be sorted out by higher people), then came the visits one after the other, and their attendant consequences - people fighting over hotels, payments, last minute changes, permissions, preventive actions and what not - not once but thrice over, for each visitor! As the day wore on, action got thicker with some seniors asking for immediate report on some road work and another bunch of people sitting in another corner of this place decided to block some super important ongoing work related to water supply by sitting in front of the JCB till their demands are met.
All this went on simultaneously for over 24 hours and I think I crossed a landmark in the study of personality across time. I will remember this day as the day when everything came down together, and I didn't lose it. The day when phone calls were non-stop on some issue or the other and I actually amazed myself at the calm I felt as I took each call and didnt take out my irritation of one on another. It was not any greatness but just a clear realisation that if I dont keep myself together, everyone else will mess up.
Maybe in many ways elections is the same thing everywhere, but in some ways, it is very different also. So this elections the takeaway for me is not so much the election preparation and its enormity (which is, btw, 2.5 times the last time),etc, but the accompanying sudden and unexpected dramas, and the mental strength needed to manage everything smoothly. For this alone, I will remember the elections of 2019 as an emergence of a different, older, calmer me, in times of crises.
All this went on simultaneously for over 24 hours and I think I crossed a landmark in the study of personality across time. I will remember this day as the day when everything came down together, and I didn't lose it. The day when phone calls were non-stop on some issue or the other and I actually amazed myself at the calm I felt as I took each call and didnt take out my irritation of one on another. It was not any greatness but just a clear realisation that if I dont keep myself together, everyone else will mess up.
Maybe in many ways elections is the same thing everywhere, but in some ways, it is very different also. So this elections the takeaway for me is not so much the election preparation and its enormity (which is, btw, 2.5 times the last time),etc, but the accompanying sudden and unexpected dramas, and the mental strength needed to manage everything smoothly. For this alone, I will remember the elections of 2019 as an emergence of a different, older, calmer me, in times of crises.
