Say Nothing - Politician

You can hardly talk about succeeding by saying nothing without bringing in politicians at some stage or the other. Yes, there may be those politicians, mythical beings almost, who say some concrete things and even, horror of horrors, DO some things but they are altogether too rare to warrant talking about.

Start with the election speeches (Where else?). Other than, of course, the usual diatribes about how the opponents are the very personification of the seven deadly sins - greed or sloth or whatever as per choice - the rest of it goes somewhat like this.

When we come to power, we will eliminate poverty, bring down inflation, eliminate unemployment, make India an attractive destination for investments, ensure the security of its citizens, yada, yada, yada.

Land of milk and honey with roads paved with gold to boot. There will be silence about the fact that the Bezoses of the world will say, "I really love the fact that you will keep inflation down and eliminate poverty and all. But it will not be attractive to us if you raise my taxes, put in pesky labor rules, or get in the way of my driving small businesses out"; your citizen, including government servants, will say, "Yeah, Nice! Keep MY taxes down and protect MY jobs and salaries, while you are making India an attractive investment destination or trying to keep down inflation"; your economists will say, "Good, find the money for paying welfare to keep down poverty, while ensuring that the fiscal deficit stays low or else inflation will go through the roof." 

ANY mention of HOW you are going to balance all these things and you are dead. Talk specifics and you will raise a whole storm of protests. "Is THAT what you think is poverty elimination?"; "Your ideas of what makes an attractive investment destination are...huh...quaint"; "These people are clueless about economic realities"...


Essentially, once you talk specifics it is all 'I dont want the milk, cos i am Vegan, that honey is probably sucrose, and if the roads are paved with gold, what's the value of that stupid yellow metal?'

You see, what is merely DESIRABLE in other areas is ESSENTIAL for a politician. To call someone a 'Say Nothing' politician is an redundancy. IF you are a politician, the first qualification is a genius for saying nothing in a lot of words.

That, of course, applies for all that follows. When you do something WHEN in government it is always in the 'larger interests of the Nation.' If you are in opposition, whatever the government did is either 'malafide', 'ill-conceived' or 'faultily executed'. Of course, you say it in a lot more words, without ANY specifics, than I can find...if I could, would I not be in Parliament instead of churning out stupid blog posts?

What? Getting angry with politicians? What's the damn point? I mean, yeah, perhaps you change a few into actually saying something concrete. and what will YOU do? It has always been easy for you to assess who has spoken well rather than who has worked well. For the latter, YOU need to do a lot of work to get the relevant information and assess it. So, the moment one politician changes into saying and doing concrete things, you'll abandon him and elect the next guy who is an entertaining speaker.

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is IT in a nutshell! It is the 'Say Nothing' brigade that will always rule the world!