I have watched them since I was a child. The motorcade. The garlands thick as rope around their necks. The way the crowd parts, not always out of respect. I used to think these men and women wanted to serve. I have grown older now. I think differently.
Power, in India, is not just a position. It is oxygen.
Ask yourself, what does it feel like to walk into a room and have it go quiet? What does it feel like when your phone call is returned in seconds, when a nod from you can move a file that has sat untouched for three years, when the seniormost official comes to your door instead of the other way around? For someone who once stood in a government office being ignored, being talked over, being made to feel small, that reversal is intoxicating. And India has millions of such people. People who were once nothing. Power tells them they are now everything.
That is the first truth. Power heals old wounds. Badly. But it heals them.
The second truth is more difficult to express. Power in India comes with an ecosystem, the chamchas, the fixers, the relatives who suddenly appear, the builders who smile too wide. A politician here does not just wield power. He becomes the centre of a small universe. People need him. And needing to be needed is perhaps the deepest human hunger of all. It is lonelier than it looks from the outside. But it is never empty.
And then there is legacy. Every neta, even the most corrupt, imagines a road named after him. A hospital. A grateful village. The desire to matter, to leave a mark on this vast, indifferent country, is not entirely ignoble. It is human. It is just rarely honest about itself.
Here is what it should actually be. Power should feel like weight, not wings. Every person who seeks it should be asked, what will you carry? Not what will you enjoy. The best leaders India has known, and we have known a few, wore authority like a burden they chose willingly, not a prize they hoarded. They were tired, not triumphant.
The hunger itself is not the problem. We all want to matter.
The problem is when the hunger becomes the whole story, when the chair matters more than the people sitting outside the office, waiting, always waiting, in the heat.
India deserves leaders who are hungrier for solutions than for salutes.
We are still waiting for more of them.
The Open Draft 