Invite for a story

I got this letter from Karmaveera. ‘Please send a story as soon as possible!’

Oh, this is one more dream come true of mine! Have I arrived? Well, even today I don’t feel that I have done a great job of writing. Yes, I have written. I have written interesting stories, novels. If any one of the stories has given any sort of small satisfaction to any one of the readers, then my writing is justified.

When the invite came to write a story, there was this news item which was bothering me. A man from Nepal comes to India (Assam), changes his birth certificate (twice!), stands for election and wins! He becomes an MP in the Indian Constitution. He makes money, earns fame.

When someone digs his past, skeletons fall out. He is a fugitive in Nepal. He has killed his sister and escaped the prison. He flees to India. Befriends someone. Deals with drugs. Then becomes an MP.

He is now caught. He justifies his actions. He says, when the people have accepted me, why should the police bother?

Really a sad state of affairs.

This was really made me very sad. Are we such type of fools that we don’t care who is going to lead us? Are we blind? Can’t we see these things? Are we so dumb? Are we so deaf that we don’t hear the inner voices of our own?

I decided to write the story. I am always fascinated by storytelling style of James Hadley Chase. When a criminal tells his own story (in first person) and gives justification to all his actions, you almost believe that he is right!

That is the power of JHC’s storytelling. I decided to use the same for this particular story. My hero, I mean myself as I tell the story myself, has run away from the neighboring country after killing his sister. He reaches the nearest State, deals with drugs. Gets attracted to a married woman, gets her husband killed and then marries her. He loses interest in her after a few years because another attractive woman comes into his life. He changes his identity twice to partake in elections. He wins. When he was campaigning for the second term, his life’s dirt would be dug out.

Now he is at a fix... he is caught and jailed. He tries to justify that when people have given their mandate, what is the big deal? Who are police to put in jail?

But he is taken to his original country and tried. My hero tries to put in all the words to argue so that he could again come back to India and become an MP and ‘serve’ the people!

We don’t have a system wherein the people standing in for elections should be ‘clean’. They should not have gone to jail. They should be minimum graduates. Their kith and kin should not be in politics.

These things would never happen and the change would never take place. Indian electorate i called the sleeping elephant. This elephant wakes up once in every five years (or whenever the elections take place) it wakes up, shakes its body once and goes back to sleep for the next five years (or till next elections) unmindful of the result of its voting and the repercussions it has to face.