Liberating Liberals From Lethargy
W hen you get into something but end up not getting what you wanted from it, you use a euphemism to describe your stint: Experience. An optimist, I wouldn’t say I have wasted the last three years of my life chasing a chimera of vyawastha parivartan (systemic change). First Baba Ramdev and then KN Govindacharya promised India would change under their pressure, sharing with me kind of revised versions of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s prescriptions for change. Then a senior journalist and close associate literally dragged me into the Aam Aadmi Party, forcing me to dump my ideological reservations against socialists Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav. The virtual, non-committal and vocal socialists I have dealt with I came out of each of the three groups, following experiences of serious discomfiture in the company of those who dream of bringing back the glory of Gupta-Maurya epochs to India and those who are simply control freaks, trying to impose the state on