By IANS,
New Delhi : Youngsters, take a cue. At the ripe old age of 110, a widow in Jamshedpur town of Jharkhand is eagerly looking forward to voting in the Lok Sabha polls.
Dhapa Devi, who has been voting since 1952, doesn’t want to miss her chance this time either.
“I want to vote. Who knows this could be my last time, right?” said the bedridden woman. Her family has planned to arrange a wheelchair for her to cart her to the polling booth April 23.
Dhapa Devi said: “Freedom has been misused in the country. Mahatma Gandhi and others had not visualised that such a situation would prevail. Bapu would have been hurt to see the present social and political scenario.”
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Dropping a line to thousands of voters
Snail mail can do wonders, even in internet age. Or so Punjab’s Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal and his wife Harsimrat are hoping as they have dashed off hundreds of thousands of letters to voters.
The letters have gone out to the electorate in Bathinda and Mansa districts. The reason is not hard to find. Harsimrat is the Akali Dal candidate from the Bathinda Lok Sabha seat.
Harsimrat has specifically targeted women voters. The letters from the two carry their coloured photographs. Postmen in the two districts suddenly find a deluge of work. One post office is said to have received 500,000 such letters in Bathinda town alone.
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Birds fly out, politicians flock in
With the weather getting hotter in Bihar, it’s time for migratory birds to fly away. But the heat and dust of general elections is making some other creatures flock right back home – politicians.
While they hardly show up at other times, many candidates for the general elections along with hundreds of workers are settling in for some hectic campaigning.
Among them is central Steel Minister and Lok Janshakti Party chief Ram Vilas Paswan. He is fighting elections from Hajipur.
Unlike the politicians, the birds – which come from Malaysia, Uzbekistan, China and Italy and descend on the Kawar lake in Begusarai district – never fail to fly back home every year.
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Twist and shout and sing for ticket
They sing, they shout� anything to attract some media attention. The many ticket seekers and their supporters at the Congress office in Delhi are well aware of the presence of the press there.
They make the maximum noise when a press briefing is held at the 24 Akbar Road office. It is also a way of showing how much support a candidate enjoys and therefore deserving of a nomination for the elections.
One such aspirant drew a lot of attention when he broke into a sad Bollywood song: “Yeh duniya, yeh mehfil, mere kaam ki nahin…”. He had evidently been denied nomination!