SONIA and so enough!

You don’t need a political pundit to predict Lok Sabha elections are being preponed. How much I hate the word preponed! But now major dictionaries have adopted it as a valid word after Indians insisted on using it.

Our excuse: if things can be postponed, why can’t they be preponed? The day is not far when we see prehumous (from posthumous) and pre-erior (of posterior) being used and recognised.

Anyway, Lok Sabha elections, euphemistically called the world’s largest democratic festival, are being advanced. And in India festivals are celebrated with traditional pomp and religious fervour. Anyway it must be in the air, because the air gets festive, you must have read.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has hinted at it. Sonia Gandhi is pulling her socks and socking her lieutenants. Mulayam is not doing anything, Laloo is back in Bihar and Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi are swapping partners. These are the signs, my friend that elections will happen in April-May.

So how are you feeling? The ads on TV and in newspapers suggest India is shining and headlines in newspapers regularly blame it on the Feel-Good factor. One political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the leader of the ruling alliance National Democratic Alliance, is particularly feeling much better after it won three of the four states that went to polls late last year.

Sonia Gandhi, the leader of India’s oldest political party, has not been feeling better. And that is giving me feel Anxious.

I am not a Sonia-supporter; neither do I have any ill feelings for her. All I have is a vested interest in Sonia sweeping it or being swept away.

I do not want her to win enough seats to stake a claim to form a government but not enough to form one. And there’s lies my vested interest. I do not want to be subjected to another headline: SONIA, YET SO FAR. I have had so enough of it.