People queue up to cast their votes at Govt Senior Secondary School, Narauna village, in Bathinda. (Express Photo: Gurmeet Singh)
The exit polls are in and they reveal a nation desperate for entertainment. With almost all recent Bollywood films or OTT series starring one nepo kid too many to be any good (looking at you, Heeramandi), citizens yearning for release of some kind, any kind, tuned in to the predictions flying thick and fast on news channels on Saturday. NDA to win by decisive margin! Modi 3.0! Congress reduced to Kerala-only party! The confident declarations and the slicing-and-dicing of data almost made viewers forget that picture toh abhi baaki hai.
In a way, exit polls are a lot like the trailer-only shows that many movie halls have now started screening. You can’t believe that you paid good money or, worse, spent a good hour or two on a precious Saturday, only to watch an incomplete picture. A trailer is good fun — builds anticipation and excitement — but even four or five of them, playing one after the other, cannot offer what a real movie can. Similarly, exit polls may be diverting for a minute or two, but after the 30-minute mark — maybe even earlier — you might begin to wonder whether anyone remembers that this is not, after all, the real thing.
Witness the certainty with which pronouncements were made: “BJP will be the biggest party in West Bengal” (Times Now Navbharat); “In Maharashtra…clearly, the [Shiv Sena] and [NCP] splits have not worked for BJP” (NDTV); “It is domination by the BJP”, “Jagan Mohan and Naveen Patnaik have been decimated… that’s the big story” (India Today). Clearly, disclaimers, much like in the movies, are a mere formality and there were few, if any, qualms, in declaring a “historic moment”.
The actual results on June 4 may well deliver exactly what the exit polls, almost without exception, have predicted: That after an election that was described as “waveless”, a Modi wave may sweep the BJP to a third term in office. But until then, it would be good to keep in mind the example of the sensor at Mungeshpur weather station which, on May 29, recorded a maximum temperature of 52.9 degrees Celsius. It turns out, the sensor had malfunctioned, and had been reporting, as the Indian Meteorological Department stated, temperatures about “3 degrees Celsius higher than the maximum temperature recorded by the standard instrument”. Bottomline: There’s only so much hot air that one should believe.
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
