Of elections and work..

One will admit without any semblance of doubt that this year's elections were far far more subdued in all ways than last years..The excitement (and lots of other crap) that was there in the air in the days leading to the big day...the intense campaigning, deal striking, running around..nothing of that this year..in fact, not more than one guy came campaigning to my hostel...atleast when i was around. And i guess it was more of a want to try to defeat the other contestant who was widely claimed to be the better one and in the end, the former lost by a decent margin..

my experiences with both elections have been very different...actively involved in campaigning last year and this year in getting things working...an unofficial worker last year, officially a worker this year. both equally taxing i must admit though the later was more enjoyable in a few ways as it had to do with working with computers, my first love :) running various tests to ascertain everything is working right, helping in debugging the program, setting up firewalls on the servers, installing linux on the clients...i do enjoy doing all these as most already know. :D and yes, the latter is advantageous over the former in the sense that there is a treat for the taking come what may unlike the former, where you might get a treat if the guy wins, which in my case last year wasnt to be. He came excruciatingly close to winning only to lose by the lowest margin ever in insti elections...25 votes :(

the experience last year taught me that IITians neednt always think rationally and can go to any extreme to get their work done and bring down the other. it brought to the fore the hate that had been there between northis and gults most of the time, atleast as far as i know. the soap box and the eboard were classic examples of this. thankfully, such scenes were nowhere to be seen this year. no whole evenings wasted running around hostels disturbing people who are seriously doing something with all about the candidate's credentials and his promises (and most of the times, they remain just that).

Now, with 5 IITians having started their own party, looks like politics is getting into the IITians blood in a big way now...I wish the guys all the best in their endaevour and hope it doesnt loose steam and fade away..I still havent been able to make up my mind on whether what they are doing is quite right or not..Because in today's sh*tty indian political arena, its quite tough to bring about a change without giving in to some bad tactics but then a start has to be made some day or the other..in that sense, this is a great start :) lets all support them and hope they bring about the much needed change that we have all been looking forward to all these days!!