Rahul Gandhi as an Inspiration
Rahul Gandhi is my muse. He inspired my life like no other person. Note that I have not used the word leader. He could be guilty of anything but leadership. He is more of a herder who has a flock of lambs from whom he gathers his wool and weaves his blankets. This is how he declared his wealth of 20 crore even though he could not tell about the wool project but I have written about it here.
His picture would have been on my wall but it is not available free even from his party office. Whenever I am sad about my life or that of my children especially their marital and professional life, it immediately fills me with satisfaction. He is such an adorable person with dimples on his cheeks. It is so sad he has no picture with visible dimples on the party website. A party that cannot market its own leader’s most disarming feature is a party with a very particular relationship with opportunity.
Rahul Gandhi makes me proud of all my humble achievements. It makes me glad for those little projects I did not undertake. These included playing violin in public or singing in public. I bought a violin once. I never played it before anyone. Rahul picked up his violin and played it before a billion people for three decades. That takes a kind of courage I do not possess. I admire it even when the notes are wrong. A man who keeps performing despite the audience’s persistent silence deserves a word stronger than courage. Perhaps devotion. Perhaps something else entirely.
Misunderstanding Rahul
Rahul Gandhi is often unfairly accused of being uninformed. He is as informed as his ancestors were. Look at the speeches of Nehru, published and available in public domain. Listen to the speeches of Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi on YouTube. Rahul is as intelligent as they were but he is 100 times more exposed to video and audio recording than his ancestors were. This creates problems and it did. Nehru never had to answer about Brazil on camera. History has been merciful to some and the camera has not been merciful to others. This is not Rahul’s fault. It is the fault of technology arriving too soon.
There is also the matter of persistence. Most politicians who lose elections twice look for an exit with dignity. Rahul Gandhi has raised exit with dignity to an art form by simply refusing to exit. Every defeat is reframed as a moral victory. Every setback becomes evidence of how threatened the other side feels. This requires a very special kind of imagination and he has never been short of that.
Kangana is Wrong
Kangana Ranaut called Rahul Gandhi a fool for destroying Congress. The word fool has a long and surprisingly respectable history. In medieval courts, the fool was the only person permitted to speak truth to the king without losing his head. In philosophy, a fool is someone who acts against wisdom, not someone who lacks intelligence. In clinical psychology, the words once used as insults, idiot, imbecile, moron, were actually graded medical categories for cognitive impairment.
Rahul Gandhi fits none of these. He speaks, perhaps too freely, but he speaks. He acts on conviction, however repeatedly unrewarded. His intelligence is not in question even among his sharpest critics. What his critics actually mean when they reach for the word fool is something far more specific. They mean a man who cannot read the room. But a man who has addressed rooms in Harvard, Cambridge and Wharton cannot be accused of that either. Perhaps the real complaint is simpler. He reads only certain rooms very well and remains genuinely unbothered by the others. That is not foolishness. That is a very expensive and carefully maintained preference.
Kangana misunderstood and is arrogant in her assessment. Though she is among the most talented actresses in the world today, not merely Hindi cinema, success breeds a certain impatience. She forgot that destruction and renovation look identical from the outside. Rahul is doing precisely what Sr. Gandhi from Gujarat wanted to do with the Congress Party. Whether this is a coincidence or a collaboration is a question historians will answer when the dust settles and the wool has been fully woven.
To call a man a fool for dismantling what took three generations to build requires ignoring one important detail. It is very hard work. It requires consistency, persistence, and a complete immunity to results. Not everyone has that gift. Rahul Gandhi has it in abundance.
He remains on my wall. He stays my muse. Every morning I look at him and feel quietly grateful for every small sensible thing I have done in my life.
References:
- Wealth Affidavit: https://images-gujarati.indianexpress.com/2024/04/Rahul-Gandhi-Affidavit.pdf
- Kangana Ranaut: https://bengali.news18.com/news/national/kangana-ranaut-criticizes-rahul-gandhi-is-destroying-congress-calls-him-fool-at-news18-rising-bharat-summit-tib-ws-l-2561282.html
- Rahul Gandhi: https://rahulgandhi.in