Now these are real people I am talking about. They appeared in posters sticking on vans, buses and walls, their smiling faces, sometimes waving hands, oozing with confidence that they were ready to serve this nation. Many of them chose to be placed under the picture of their leaders, pictures spread out like umbrellas in clusters of two or three. They have got everything you would like to see in a candidate: loyalty for the leaders and posture for the people. They looked eager to enter the public life.

If you take out the political kabuki, then nothing is wrong with it. People belong to people, and nothing is wrong when some of them can afford to draw the attention of others. If there is only one life to live, it can be increased by reaching out to touch more people like one flow in many streams, many drafts in one wind. Nothing is wrong if you seek a little publicity. After all familiarity is propaganda. When you try to know others, you want others to know you as well. Pubic life is nothing but a manifestation of private propensity to magnify one's own existence. In power one feels multiplied the same way reflections in the mirror grow numerous when another mirror is held in front of it.

Strange though if you think of it, that people we never met looked at us from the posters and offered their greetings. All those pairs of eyes, smiling faces and raised hands were trying to catch our attention, often slinking away in the back or side of speeding cars like apparitions vanishing into the thin air. We never saw them before, and we might not see them after, but their greetings remain etched in our memories like the afterglow of an extinguished fire.

But all said and done, what we see is an emerging pattern. Talk to strangers, get close to them, woo their trust and get what you want. In a way what a man does to get a woman, politicians do to get the voters. There is a kind of coquetry in both, a long-drawn lustful predilection between strong and weak, a consummate profligacy that turns purported relationships into a showdown of usurpation.

It is said that a country gets the leaders it deserves. What kind of leaders do we deserve? Do we deserve leaders, who greet us from the posters, who remember to wish us well right before the election time with the flippancy of a man who is trying to seduce a woman? And it works. That is why posters are so prolific in our lives, our walls, fences, cars. Wherever there is empty space, it is covered by faces of people who want to get introduced to us.

Some of them we know, others we don't, yet we deserve them to occupy our political offices, meddle with our lives, disturb our peace and deprive our rights. These poster boys of politics are like hocus-pocus, because they bully us, and they bluff us, coming from the posters and going back to posters, just like cartoon characters which become animated from still pictures.

It's funny that they are also flimsy like their posters, that they have length and breadth, but not depth. You can almost see through them, their intentions showing through their pretensions, their greetings bleating with political connotations that should make them suspects to us. But the biggest surprise is that it works. People see them, read their posters, and vote for them in the elections. It repeats again and again, like the unmistakable spell of an indefatigable sorcerer.

Let us change the scene for a minute and turn to Germany where a grisly murder is creating great waves. The court has ordered retrial in a case of manslaughter where a cannibal killed another man and ate 20kg of his flesh. This German cannibal found his victim on the Internet who travelled all the way from Belgium to grant his killer his long cherished fantasy. This man took lots of pain killers and drank schnapps while the other man tied him up on a table and then slowly dismembered him piece by piece. Only when the victim fell unconscious from loss of blood that his killer decided to slit the throat of the dying man and put an end to his misery.

When you read the posters, and think of the people who are being primed up by unscrupulous men to repeat their mistakes, it reminds of the useful idiot who walked up to a ruthless man and volunteered to get himself chopped. How are we as a people any different, because we fall for the same trick no matter how many times it is repeated? We walk into the same trap, vote for the same dishonest men and then spend four years resenting that mistake until we make the same mistake again.

These posters are perhaps the pillars of our pretentious politics. This is where it starts and this is where it ends, people forever exploiting people through gabs or guiles or both, this endless cycle of dog-eat-dog scramble in the name of liberty and freedom. It is all so flaky, all so unreal, all so deeply rooted in the mystery of nature where species entice species in the endless art of deception.

That is why we see pictures piling up on pictures, leaders in layers of generations, being used as baits for the people. People almost wear their leaders as badges, using their names and images equally for elections and extortions, the line between them blurred at times. We use our leaders as ladders, our parties as pastiches, ideologies as incantations to get what we want. Democracy is when we do all of these in the name of the people, the ultimate suckers who don't have a clue how they are taken for a ride.

It was a pleasant surprise to see those posters around this Eid like we saw them around previous Eids. But this time the posters were more numerous, if you know what I mean. This is an open season for courtship with the voters. One parliament member sacrificed more than hundred cows to feed the entire constituency. More to come. There will be free cigarettes, tea, snacks and handshakes from glad-handing candidates, who will come to your doors and ask for votes. If you are a voter, don't get spoiled. This good time is not going to last forever.

What worries me is just that. People will be misled once again to vote for the charmers, candidates who will look good on the posters and give fiery speeches in public meetings. They will use their leaders, party and money to win elections. Then they will turn into Draculas once the sun goes down on the election year and the winning candidates return to the descending darkness of their narrow interests.

Perhaps we should ban those posters, for the sake of decency, cleanliness and honesty. I bet you won't find so many posters in another country. We need to start cleaning up, because there is a connection between clean conscience, clean city and clean country. May be that is the message we should print on posters, and stick them on walls, cars, vans, trucks and buses, and wherever else we find a space.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.