In Asian elections we are all losers
TODAY is the anniversary of the first time a US president appeared on TV: Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. These days we have wall-to-wall coverage of these guys. Who cares? The three people campaigning for the job today may have very different faces, but from an Asian point of view, they are triplets. They are all in favour of money, democracy, and the continued export of American, er, "culture." (I use the term broadly.)
Elections in this region are much more varied and curious than Western ones. Often we have to choose from a list only one name long. Sometimes dead people stand for election (India). Sometimes dead people win (North Korea). Sometimes people win whom we soon wish were dead (lots of places).
Hundreds of articles are written about people who win elections, so let's instead focus on the losers (a term which in Asia usually encompasses failed candidates plus all the residents of the place in question).
First prize in the losers category goes to the members of a historical association in Beijing who raised 240,000 yuan and gave it to a man claiming to be revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen making a political comeback. The flaw in his argument: Sun has been dead for eight decades. But the imposter tricked the history-lovers by the incredibly clever trick of telling them that rumours of his death had been et cetera, et cetera. The supporters accepted this argument, despite it indicating that Sun was one and a half centuries old (Sun died in 1925 aged 69). Police eventually arrested the guy.
No doubt these history-lovers, chastened by the experience, will divert their funds to some worthier candidate, and are at this moment actively inquiring whether Confucius or Buddha are standing for local party chief somewhere.
Occasionally one encounters a person who is a loser by choice, such as Ajit Kumar Jain, who wants to get into The Guinness Book of Records as the world's ultimate loser (when that position is vacated by Britney Spears, that is.) The factory worker from India's Madhya Pradesh has stood in seven national, nine state, and seven civic elections, and proudly lost them all. He uses a handcart as a campaign vehicle and his total expenses for his latest bid for national power added up to the equivalent of $7. In terms of publicity achieved against money spent, he's probably performing better than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.
But perhaps the title of "ultimate loser" should not go to someone in the political field at all, but to an exam candidate. When Shivdan Yadav of Rajasthan was 18, he said he would get married after he had passed his Class 10 examination. He failed the test, so his parents asked the girl they had lined up for him to wait a year. He failed the next year as well, and the one following. Shivdan took a vow that he would not marry without a Class 10 pass. He is now in his late 50s, and has taken the same exam 38 times without success. He was still single last time I checked.
Don't worry about the girl. Terrified of reaching old age (that is, her twenties) without a husband, she married someone else 40 years ago.
Perhaps it was Sun Yat-sen. After all, way back them he would have only been a sprightly young 112-year-old.
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