The gesture that counts

Elections are a fun time to be in India. I have always been curious about the pomp and splendor, the idea of rallies and the advertising ways that are in vogue. Today we were taking a stroll over our lovely lake ( I can perhaps call it a waste free zone, atleast to a good extent) and soon as we enter, we spot a huge group of people.

Unmistakably it was someone from the political segment giving out pamphlets and papers. People naturally being sweet wouldn’t refuse when ganged upon and receive the pamphlets and happily throw it on the ground.

It was quite a disturbing scene as we see so many people litter, well the simple thought is install dustbins or two – tell these people to stop giving pamphlets. It is very difficult to see who is wrong here cos the ones giving are not at fault and there are so many throwing away which we cannot count.

The best way was to tackle at the source. Now the simplest thought was – Go to these people, tell them about the problem and for sure know that they wouldn’t respond and come out dejected. The other thought was quite naive, we thought we’d collect the ones on the ground and put it in a dustbin ( One good deed for a day right? ;))

Well we did collect these pamphlets, we could easily get about 40 of them thrown all around, collected them and somehow didn’t  feel like throwing in the bin. There was a different idea. We completed our walk, spotting for pamphlets all the way, collected 40-45 of them and then thought just putting in the dustbin doesn’t make any difference.

Instead we went up to these guys, gave the 40-45 papers back to the one handing out and said – “You might find these useful, they were the very same you gave and were thrown all around” and smiled. You might expect what happened next, the man smiled and thanked us profusely and continued giving them to people!

Well truthfully nothing ever changed or probably it did. I didn’t expect anything would either. But something that was very fulfilling about this endeavor was that there always seems to be a way to make your voice heard. Maybe me going and shouting might have worked better.

Or getting people together and creating a scene might have helped or maybe just doing this might have helped. Bottom line, we just did what we felt right and we did feel that we stood up for it in a very nice way. I am sure there will be a lot of people who will find it lame, but I guess we still did it anyway for in the thought a lot of people are geniuses but sometimes doing the little things can go a much longer way even in their simple subtle ways :)