Are we there yet!!! (Part - 2)

This is year of hope in many ways. The general elections are around the corner and hopes of several individuals, groups, parties and a nation are at stakes. The glimpses of upcoming change, deeply rooted despair & splendid hope were clearly visible in the recent state elections. While in couple of states it was just exchange of power between two rivals, Delhi saw a major change when AAP made its presence felt strongly. It was, in a true sense, victory of recently awaken common man conscious. It, however, lasted for a very brief time.

The glorious start slowly turned into just another political affair with lots of media coverage. Around two months long drama at the center stage, just left the hopes of ‘Aam Adami’ shattered, unfortunately, yet again.

It is still, at least to my understanding, a deep mystery whether all the AAP’s moves are politically planned actions or result of inexperience in handling the power or just trying to apply ‘Sane’ rules in the game of ‘Insane’ politics. I would leave this dilemma on hold, for some time.

However, there are striking similarities between a start-up and AAP. And being associated with a start-up, I couldn't help noticing these similarities.

To start with, it all started with an objective to bring ‘change’ - started by veterans, enthusiasts and novice to ‘fill the gap’. As several books on start-up suggest that most of the time, founders came together first mostly without any clear idea of the future and started. The most important factor was to form a group of ‘like-minded’ people. Anna’s movement provided a perfect platform for the same.

Then the newly formed group found an objective to follow. Delhi state assembly election was the first ‘target’ to showcase the vigor and it worked well till then.  And then it exploded J Just like a start-up trying to scale by leaps & bounds without actually planning for it. The hiring spree went awfully bad and the original culture got diluted. Chaos is introduced to a systematically working small group. The original objective got different interpretation all across. Discipline suddenly became an issue. Enthusiasm turned into a mad-rash.

Most of the successful big companies have gone through this phase. They started well, struggled to get stability and once the chaos of growing-up is handled, they became a focused as well as successful group.

So let’s hope to achieve some focus from this chaos. Let this testing time be passed filtering the selfish opportunists from the genuine leaders. Let it come out in any form – a fine-tuned AAP or a branch of AAP or any other political party with an understanding of common man or a well established party acknowledging today’s issues. Let it be yet another battle of common man. And let’s hope that ‘aam adami’ wins again.