Are you livid with/praying to the Sanghis/Modiji, Congis/Rahulji, or AAPtards/Arvindji? Did your name mysteriously disappear from the electoral rolls, leaving you sobbing and beating your fists on the polling station floor? Are you seething about/enthused by Giriraj Singh, Pravin Togadia and Ramdas Kadam? Are you gunning for/defending the incumbents? Do you lie awake at night worrying about religious polarisation? Are you emotionally exhausted by this election?
This is for anyone who is all worked up about Mandate 2014 - everyone, in other words, except Mumbai. It's for all of us who are fretting about the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) selling the country to crony capitalists, or the Congress not allowing anybody to sell anything at all, or the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) sleeping on the pavement and gheraoing people who pay their bills. It's for those of us suffering from NaMonia, whether because we think he descended from heaven, or because we know he busted out of hell. It's for every stressed-out Indian voter.
Three words for all of us: take it easy. Too much emotional participation in democracy can make you ill. This election season has already been long enough to make our eyes bleed, and we're still three weeks away from knowing whether we should be ordering champagne or trying to jump off the balcony. Our emotions have been so high-pitched for so long that we're burning out. It's time to pause and put things in their place.
If you live in an Indian metropolis, you can forget about looking at the stars (except in Mumbai, where they're thick on the streets); but you can, and should, get a hold of Cosmos, the remake of Carl Sagan's classic teleseries Cosmos: A Personal Journey. Thirty years after Sagan first took the layman on a tour of the universe - 30 years of science, computer imaging and modelling, and hi-definition television experience later - Cosmos is back with a compelling anchor in Neil deGrasse Tyson, possibly America's most famous contemporary scientist. His passion for science - and his ability to defang it for the math-challenged - is infectious and exciting; he puts the rock and the star back into rock star.
It's so easy, amid the sound and fury of the human scale, to forget the cosmic scale; and it is very calming to be reminded of it without having to be a god-botherer. In addition to reopening one's eyes to the mind-popping wonders of nature, it puts things in perspective.
If nothing else, watch the first 15 minutes of the first episode, in which Dr Tyson lays out our local address in the universe: Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster, Observable Universe. By the time he gets there, your tongue will be lolling in your head and many of your synapses will have taken their own lives. Thirty seconds later, when he gets to multiverses, you will have passed out from the inability to process. Being unconscious is very relaxing.
"Put things in perspective" is what Trin Tragula did in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (the second book in Douglas Adams' classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series), because his wife was always telling him to. He built a delightful piece of tech called the Total Perspective Vortex, through which a person could place himself or herself - marked with a "You are here" dot - in relation to the whole universe. He tested it on his wife, whose brain was instantly destroyed by the shock of the experience.
The only person ever to survive the Total Perspective Vortex was Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed president of the Galaxy. He went into it at a time when he was living in a computer-generated universe of his own, and the Total Perspective Vortex therefore confirmed to him that he was, hands down, the most important person in the universe.
Narendra Modi also exists in a saffron-and-khaki-generated universe of his own, and suspects that God chose him to lead India, so his perspective might actually be closer to Zaphod's than to Dr Tyson's. Perhaps all politicians are a version of Zaphod. Trin Tragula proved, in fact, "that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion".
Be that as it may, we, the people, desperately need to maintain perspective because (a) nobody can sustain this pitch for too long, and (b) whatever happens on May 16, we're going to have to keep calm and carry on. So let's back up a step, and dial it down a notch. We need to remind ourselves that, whatever the election result, it's not the end of the world. That baby is too mind-bendingly, fabulously far away for us to see.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
