Looks like BJP has hit upon a new campaign tactic that it intends to standardise across the country, whether it be the prime ministerial election or the chief ministerial. If you want to get a candidate elected, make a comic book based on the person’s life. After Narendra Modi’s brain numbingly boring Bal Narendra comic, we now have Kinny Didi, alias Kiran Bedi, also featured as a comic.
The comic was surprisingly released a day before the election results were announced. Bedi declared that this 32-page comic book about herself was released to thank everybody who worked on the chief ministerial campaign. Speaking to the press from the BJP base camp for the elections in Delhi, she said,”I want it to be an inspiration for parents and students alike.” Talk about self obsession!
Now why was this not released at the beginning of the canvassing period, one does not know. Obviously, if the party wanted to release the comic to help them win the elections, and I can think of no other reason why they would print such a comic, an early release ‘may’ have helped.
‘May’ here is the key word. The comic book, if it may be called that, features an animated version of Kiran Bedi, alias Kinny Didi who was so gooood, and I mean so goooood, that she merited a comic named after her. At least that’s what the BJP wants us to believe, I guess.
For, if this was intended to be a children’s book, like Bal Narendra was, then BJP must know – It is very unlikely that any child would voluntarily pick up such a dull and preachy book. It sounds marginally more interesting than Narendra Modi’s comic because it’s the story of a woman succeeding in a man’s world.
But beyond that, it takes the same route as Bal Narendra of being a sickeningly sweet do-gooder who could never do any wrong, and like I mentioned before, preachy and dull.
It shows Bedi as a daughter who used to mop the house floor, a student who won all the debates and sports events she participated in, and a police trainee who preferred to dress only in pants.
One story shows how she overheard her father calling the area officer to help a woman who said her husband had been wrongly charged by police. “Oh God, make me someone who can help others,” Bedi, the teenager, is shown thinking. She also questions the dowry system and protests being discouraged from taking up science as she was not good at mathematics.
“Kiran has always been clear-minded… so she took admission in another school where she got double-promotion by opting for science and Hindi and superseded her seniors within a year,” the comic book states.
“This booklet will tell you how to become sincere parents. A seed doesn’t know anything and cannot choose its gardener. It is the gardener who gives the seed shape. I am what I am because of my parents,” the former top cop told BJP workers a day before the results were declared as she handed out copies of the comic to them.
It is also marginally better than Bal Narendra because it does not depict incredible stories like a boy swimming in a crocodile-infested river, fighting caste system, boy who bathes and clothes a sadhu, feeds soldiers going to China and saves a pigeon (bah!), among others.
But regardless of all this, the very fact that there are no twists in the story, no conflicts and definitely no monsters, definitely means that no child will pick these books up voluntarily, EVER!
In fact, it is reminiscent of those moral studies classes that were force fed to many of us during primary school. Those classes were a regular yawn fest where most of us played book cricket or tic-tac-toe at the back of our moral studies notebooks. Kids today would probably do the same at the back of these comic books. Hangman, anybody?
The ill-timed release of the book, one day before the results was declared, is being touted in the media as ‘too little too late’. But maybe it was a good move on part of the party. We don’t know how well the Bal Narendra books sold, but I am guessing that if one more sickening do-gooder comic had been foisted upon the tired and exasperated public before polling day, then chances are the party’s performance in the elections may have ranged closer to that of the Congress. Also, let’s be clear, Bedi is no Modi.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
More on>> Balancing Act
