Another Indian Election

This summer, in a poling booth near you watch the biggest democratic drama in the world.

These are the things I remember from the last elections.

1. Large number of Film/ TV stars joining parties at will. It was a really funny spectacle, watching stars and wannabe's lining up.
2. Nobody expected the BJP to loose. It was taken for granted they would walk away with a comfortable win.
3. Sonia Gandhi was expected to loose hands down.
4." The left? Who’s that?" was the attitude of news anchors.
5. It was supposed to be the first "presidential" style election in India. Putting Sonia Gandhi vs. Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Guess is was also the last.

So many sure shot predictions were broken last time. Let’s see how this year’s predictions go.

I will be following some blogs and columnists this time to understand the election. The most important one of them all will be Swapan Dasgupta at the Daily pioneer. His analysis is simple, straight and very funny most of the times.

MK Akbar seems to be a good new find . Not read enough of his columns yet.

Informed Comment

There are some blogs out there thatreally amaze me. The most impressive one I have recently stumbled upon is Informed Comment written by Juan Cole.When the Israeli army invaded Gaze I barely understood what was happening.

While most news channels choose to just report events during the invasion, I was a bit confused by coverage in the international media including the NYT and The Guardian.Most of these papers organized their coverage around the impact of this event on the other big event. Obama's swearing in.

Then I stumbled on this blog and was quite amazed at the length the author goes to analyse news from a variety of sources and his ability to make reading it relatively simple. And this is the middle east! Its quite complex and he really does help me understand the situation better.
He also vovers Islamic issues and studies. His clarity ensures I can just look up his posts and understand what's happening in that part of the world.