Kerala: UDF hopes to return to power, CPM repeat win
THE CPM district committees have already finalized the preliminary list of candidates which will vetted by state committee, the UDF has decided to prepare the list within in a week.
With the Election Commission announcing single phase poll for Kerala on April 6, the principal parties are left with just 38 days for devising strategies, selecting candidates and venturing out on the ground to campaign.
The three major Fronts; CPM-led ruling LDF, opposition Congress-led UDF and BJP-led NDA which were going slow on candidate selection, will have to expedite the process and introduce their contestants before the electorate at the earliest.
The CPM district committees have already finalized the preliminary list of candidates which will vetted by state committee, the UDF has decided to prepare the list within in a week while the BJP-NDA also plans to do it by next week.
The ruling LDF is making an all out attempt to repeat 2016 victory, something which is considered impossible for any Front in the state. The LDF under former chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan came very close to doing a repeat in 2011, when it won 68 seats leaving the UDF with a majority of just four seats including Speaker. However, in the last elections the LDF secured a clear majority winning 91 seats and the UDF got only 47 and BJP 1. However, this time its going to be a tight contest with the UDF giving a tough fight to the ruling Front.
The LDF is fighting the elections on the government’s performance. Infrastructure development projects, national highway widening, gas pipeline, social security initiative including welfare pension for the poor and marginalized and ration kits for families during Covid pandemic are some of the achievements it is highlighting among the electorate.
The UDF on the other hand is focusing on he failures of the government, corruption, gold smuggling case involving chief minister’s former principal secretary, money laundering, backdoor appointments and unemployment. But the latest issue regarding the clandestine MoU signed with an American company for `5000 cr deep sea trawling project is seen by the UDF as their trump card in polls. There are 40 constituencies in the coastal belt and about 10 constituencies lying close to coastal areas. Of these the LDF had won 30 in the last elections. The UDF could bag only nine.
The UDF has scaled up the campaign against the MoU which has now been scrapped, accusing the LDF of plotting the sell out of precious marine wealth to US company. The UDF is taking out two jathas from March 1, along the Kerala coast to campaign on the issue.
The LDF is wary of UDF campaign. It has decided to organise public meetings in coastal areas to contain the damage.
The BJP-led NDA which had secured nearly 15 per cent votes in the last elections and managed to open its account in Kerala Assembly, is trying hard to expand its base.
“They say all property is theft Hence, I own nothing and am left bereft
My ancestors or thieves
And depending, then, on what one believes
About making and sweat
It’s just my bet
On Proudhon who formulated the phrase
With which Marx disagreed — All praise, all praise!”
— From Dil Deykey Dildo by
Bachchoo
Tnot
were
it rich through
true —
never
so
I’ll
Earls
toil
place
o “zoom”, a dictionary will tell you, is to travel fast or rise quickly and perhaps noisily. It must have been, I thought with some irony, that the principal instrument I seem to use to confer with anyone in the lockdowns of the plague year was called Zoom. One goes nowhere.
If it is, as I suspect, not a Chinese but an American device, there was probably no ironic intent in naming it. After all, 74 million Americans don’t care whether a person is a self-obsessed habitual liar, misogynist, racist, fraudster, rabble-rousing insurrectionist, anti-democrat and fantasist, they still want to make him President. Not very high on the irony scale, then.
But one must admit that Americans are good on the onomatopoeic front. It was their popular and renowned form of literature, the comic, which gave us words for violence. I suppose “bang bang” may have preceded Amerigo Vespucci’s discovery of Trumpistan and may have been imported, perhaps from Ireland, but adding “Chitty Chitty” to it was a stroke of genius attributed to the USA. But I digress.
What I meant was that the comics gave us words for fisticuffs such as “sock” and “pow”. Who can’t see in their mind’s eye the spiked splatter of a powerful punch from Superman or Batperson landing on the villain’s skull as this nasty individual tilts away from the vertical? The words inside the spiked bubbles or splashes, giving visual form to the impact of fists, aren’t exactly onomatopoeic, as a punch sounds more like “phut” — but “pow” packs imaginative power.
So, gentle reader, Zoom, as the name of a device by which you connect to anyone (who has an appropriate electronic device, of course) anywhere in the world, may be a word that is supposed to and successfully conveys the speed of contact between stationary persons — two or a full screen of them.
If Indians had invented the ethereal conversation device and needed an onomatopoeic name for it, they would probably have called it “Dhishoom”, because as far as I know it’s the only sound word that we have invented. It is of course Bollywood for the sound of a gun going off, and there are always two shots fired so it becomes “Dhishoom! Dhishoom!” The precedent is the Western “bang bang” — because if it’s just the one word, it could merely stand for the slamming of a door. I venture to speculate that we would have called our communication device “Dhishoom” because having invented the word, we use it as the name of a chain of very good British restaurants. That’s not supposed to represent the explosion of your stomach when you eat there.
My constant, even daily, use of Zoom has given me several useless insights into human behaviour, perhaps not new ones, but ones that confirm what we do and are. It has also reinforced my self-consciousness in a not terribly positive way.
You see, Zoom forces you to see yourself as you speak to others and, depending on the strength of echo in your device, you can even hear yourself speak and, like me, be rather surprised at your lamentable accent, the slight lisp you hadn’t noticed before and the stupid fumbles and pauses you thought others made but which your fluency was free of.
And then there’s appearances, of course. Before a Zoom call, I check my hair and brush it this way and that. My creeping baldness (a family inheritance which, as they say, looking on the bright side, allows more space for rude tattoos) and the fact that I haven’t had a haircut since the lockdown began does funny things, in my self-conscious perception, to my appearance. The hair in the centre of my head insists on standing upright, as though I was auditioning for the role of TinTin from the French comics.
I used to despise the self-deceivers who brushed their hair forwards to hide their baldness, but now find myself wondering, comb in hand at the mirror, whether it’s a good strategy. It’s not.
Gentle reader, in my job as a teacher, and then in my short and happy life as an agitator and pamphleteer, I have addressed countless classes, assemblies and audiences. I never began with the old opening: “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking”, but perhaps should have.
Zoom has demonstrated to me that any conceit I cultivate about my ability to present an argument is precisely that. I have now taken a vow during the Christian Lent to begin speaking on Zoom with that precise and modest caveat. Watch that screen!
Zoom gives one an insight into the rooms that your “zoomists” work or speak from. The convention is to have a bookshelf or some dignified piece of art behind you, but that may only be true of the people I associate with or speak to or watch on a televised Zoom. I wonder if others have dirty pictures or washing hanging up behind them as they interlocute.