Dear Kejriwal ji,
Not too long ago, i risked going against the Supreme Court’s verdict on article 377 by going fully gay for you, the messiah of hope, the man who was to end all corruption in the country.
I asked you, RTI activist, Magsaysay award winner, catalyst of a massive anti-corruption movement in the nation, and the surprise winner of a lot of seats in the Delhi election, to not let us down. There were the hopes of the aam aadmi on your modest shoulders. Sachin Tendulkar had recently retired. Vidya Balan had gained even more weight. Nothing seemed right, and we were counting on you to help bring hope back into our lives.
arvind kejriwal in muffler
After a lot of kabhi haan kabhi na, you formed the Delhi government and it was history being made in front of our eyes. This was just the opportunity to prove you worth and show us what a well-meaning person could change the much-hated system.
I opened the paper every day hoping to see a picture of yours handing over suspension letters to corrupt officials, like Anil ji did in Nayak. Every day i looked forward to news of people no longer locking their homes when they went out because, you know, Ram Rajya was here. Every evening, i watched TV hoping to see Arnab ji be a little happy with his life, because everything was going to be right now.
Alas. How naive i was.
None of that happened. All you did was increase subsidies on water and electricity in a display of economically unviable socialism, asked people to conduct stings and send in videos to you, setup a durbar which ended in a stampede, and then, YOU RESIGNED. 49 days. I understand you are an engineer, but even engineers don’t change their jobs that quickly.
But then you were always special. IITian. Civil services. RTI. People with such strong CVs are always hard to retain. I know i have struggled for months to hire a good Java developer. But 49 days? Seriously, 6 months ka to probation hi hota hai.
You know, i have had fights with people who said that you are a drama queen, a conspiracy of the Congress, Digvijay Singh in disguise, the son-in-law of the CIA director, or all of the above. Because i believed in you. I told them that you are going to change the country. You may sometimes seem blunt and impatient and illogical, but you are our saviour. Policemen were already reportedly refusing to take bribes, fearing a whiplash from you. People were grumbling about you spoiling the going bribery rates. There was change in the air. Even the birds were not crapping on my car’s windshield anymore.
On Twitter, on Facebook, my friends, fans and lovers said that i am a paid AAP agent, that i am being illogical and living in la-la land by thinking something will happen. I told them that i wished i was getting paid to support this noble cause (won’t that be awesome? win-win situation), but that you hadn’t asked for my account number yet.
People told me that i am stupid. That my IQ has been reduced to Salman Khan movie levels because of all the years of being an engineer. That i must believe them when they say that you are just a fantastic Congress conspiracy to bring down the BJP by cutting their votes. I mean the Congress is run by Rahul Gandhi. Surely they can’t come up with something that farsighted.
I stood my ground. I told them that the Congress is corrupt, the BJP is no less, and if you show us some hope, we should not lose our faith so fast.
I stood by you, dear Arvind Kejriwal. I stood thick and strong. Like Manmohan Singh amidst his gang of corrupt ministers, who by the way are all getting tickets to stand in the elections again, while he likely hunts for a nice retirement bungalow that we taxpayers will pay for. How come you have not talked about any of that? You seem to have only one target these days.
Anyway talking of tax, you should know that my heart cries every time a third of my salary gets wiped off every month. I have always maintained that as a responsible citizen i will not cheat on taxes and give my due to the country. Because if i dont, then who will? Doctors and lawyers? Haha. I have never even submitted a fake medical or travel claim. Never. Not once. I once had a fight on Twitter with someone who thought i was stupid for believing in my civic duties.
Which was the whole reason for my belief in you. I thought we had finally got a visionary leader who will change things. But then you ordered the subsidies and i was like – there goes my precious money to serve the cause of the votebank. But i stayed silent. God has mysterious ways. You are the god of anti-corruption movement. You could do no wrong.
I thought i wouldn’t complain and would bear it like a housewife in a marriage with an alcoholic but kind husband. But for how long?
You need to stop being this krantikaari, because you are just coming across as superficial now. All this talk of how media is bad and Modi is bad and Ambani is bad and all that makes you look like a frustrated aam aadmi. We want you to be a khaas aam aadmi, someone who has the poise and grace and tact to fix things instead of constantly muddying the waters and not achieving anything other than press footage.
You need to know which battles to fight. You need to know how to fight them. You need to stop playing a victim, because you had the chance to change Delhi, and you gave it up of your own free will.
For the record, i was never in favor of your going national. I wanted you to first prove yourself in Delhi, show that you can walk that talk, that you can do more than just give impressively candid interviews where you name and shame everybody in the whole world. How do you expect to suddenly find hundreds of super honest people worthy of being a part of your movement, special enough that we vote for them in the elections based just on your word? I already told you i had to struggle for months to find a java developer, and they are a dime a dozen. Honest people are much rarer.
photo
And what’s with your obsession with Modi ji? Agreed he is being touted as the nation’s next biggest hope, but he isn’t the one who has run the economy into a giant hole or perpetrated scam after scam. Why are you only after him? Why stop finding any fault with Sheila ji once you gained power in Delhi? Why have you not mentioned Vadra ji and his alleged misdeeds? What happened to your tiff with Salman Khursheed and that illegal NGO? Why? Why? Why?
[And just for this paragraph, i am going to be stamped a right wing RSS fanatic, because that’s how we roll in our great secular nation]
You know what, there still is a faint flicker of hope in my mind that all the conspiracy theories will be lies and you will actually change the world. I am a hopeless romantic like that, but for now you are just beginning to come across as a Bollywood hero who punches in the air and pretends to be a stud as the villian falls twenty feet away.
As a purported anti-corruption crusader, you have set high standards to which you are going to be held. Please stop the dramatics. You are getting on our nerves now.
I swear i will commit suicide if you continue going on in this random manner. Rest assured, i will check first and only do that if the nation wants me to.
Yours gayfully,
A Frustrated Aam Aadmi
PS: I am not on the payroll of the Congress, Modi ji, Ambani ji, or Arnab ji,
