Friday, May 8, 2009

The chance of making a choice

Day before yesterday I got a once in five years( if everything goes fine) chance to make my choice for the parliament from my constituency. It happened for the first time that Clause 49 (o) was publicised freely and even few newpaper also talked about it. The clause gives you a right to reject all the candidates if they are not worthy enough(which is a general perception about the candidates). I still went to the polling booth around 3 PM with an inquisitiveness about the clause as mentioned above. Howevere after entering the booth and looking at the list I found one of the name appearing above the party name . The moment of truth was entirely different from what I expected it to be. While pressing the button of EVM, neither I thought about the local problems nor the national issues but I only made the decision on the basis of whether the candidate is accesible or not.

This action validated my firm belive in thory of constraints. I feel that access is a major constraint to the effectiveness of any candidate. Most of the time due to the perosnality clout of the candidate or his dubious image become responsible for him getting accesible to a common man. All the parties thus to begin with consider the constraint of accessibility associated with a candidate while giving ticket to him. Most of the times the parties consider all the factors related to cast and creed which is another constaint to accessibility but I feel that analysis should go beyond the limits of caste and also look into other effectivenss parameters which are consideed in corporate world for establishing leadership qualities in a candidate. The more appropriate criteria could be education, communication, vintage of the candidate in the constituency, the character of the person and his behaviour with his family and business partners, nature of business, past performances, followership(casteless) and above all his willingness to serve and not to be served.