By Vimal Kapoor
There was a movie ‘Nayak’ in which Anil Kapoor played a politician for one day. In the film a common man steps into the shoes of the politician. I have a dream where the politician would play the common man for one year, where politicians would live next door to you… literally. The man or woman whom you voted to revamp your quiet residential colony lives three doors down in a modest house just like yours. Just sample the following scenario.
For one year their children would attend the same neighborhood school as your kids, ride the same overcrowded bus, and play in the same park where the swings are rusty and the grass is patchy. The potholes on your street remain unfilled for months; they would drive over those same craters every single morning on their way to the work. Their car suspension will take the same daily beating that yours does. And when the community finally has enough, they don’t hide behind security cordons or press statements—they step out onto the street and hear it directly, loudly, personally. The way neighbours have held each other accountable for most part of human history.
A health minister will stand in the long, disorderly queues at ‘Doon Hospital’ alongside ordinary patients, waiting his turn for a consultation, feeling the frustration of delayed appointments and medicine shortages. An education minister whose own children will sit in the same government school classroom with leaking roofs, broken fans, and teachers who haven’t received their salaries on time. An agriculture minister who tends his own small plot of land during the off-season, watching the same erratic monsoons ruin his crops and battling the same middlemen who cheat farmers at the mandi. A finance minister who shops for groceries at the local market every weekend and feels the sting of inflation in his own wallet when the price of dal or milk jumps again. An environment minister who would breathe the same polluted air on his evening walks, whose family endures the same coughs and allergies that plague the rest of the city.
The current system is exactly the opposite. They rarely experience the daily grind their laws create. A labour minister who never steps in at a factory. A power minister whose home never goes dark during so called load-shedding.
When you make politics a lucrative profession, you attract people primarily motivated by money and power. When you make it a temporary duty tied to real life, you draw structurally different candidates—people who care about outcomes because those outcomes land on their own doorstep.
The final, and perhaps most vital piece is accountability. In this wish, the man who raised your taxes has to look you in the eye at the weekend gathering at ‘Parade Ground’ or at the school gate. There is no escaping the human consequences of his choices. No motorcade with flashing beacons and blaring siren will whisk him away. No PR team to spin a yarn. Just neighbours, face to face.
I wish this dream takes shape. It does not promise perfect people or flawless governance but politicians who are accountable. I have a dream where the politician who decides your children’s future shares the same hopes, fears, and daily struggles as you. Where decisions hurt—or help—the decision-maker first. That is the kind of scenario worth dreaming about.
(Vimal Kapoor, a Dehradun resident, is passionate about literature, creative writing, cricket and exploration through travel)
