It’s election time again, which for people like me, means being summoned by TV channels to appear on talk shows and give our ‘expert’ opinions. No one pays us with the exception of NDTV, but all of us love to appear on the idiot box so we can try and change the world.

So there we were a motley crowd, if ever there was one, sitting in an Irani café at the unearthly hour of eight in the morning. Irani cafes are usually bustling at this time with office goers downing a quick cutting chai on the way to work. (Cutting chai is one cup of tea split into two with no objection from the management.) But here, there was only a smattering of patrons probably because it was spitting outside, and when that happens people stay inside.

Even though it was so early in the morning, the standing candidates for the local Maharashtra assembly seats were already out campaigning. And so the BJP and the Congress had sent surrogates, or their official representatives, to speak for them. Raj Thackeray’s MNS party, being new, had sent the candidate himself, a smart young man who spoke in rapid-fire English and whose profile was so lean that it was unlikely that he had stowed away any stones to throw at Bihari taxi drivers.

Keeping them company was an independent candidate from the suburbs who actually stood a chance of winning. And another Independent — a former policeman — who stood absolutely no chance of winning, but was proof of the vitality of our democracy.

Because here was someone with neither qualifications nor experience, neither ideas nor articulation but still had the guts to stand on the nearest soapbox. Finally, there was a candidate in a suit, which at eight in the morning in an Irani café may seem somewhat discordant, but then he represented the newly-formed Professional Party of India, and what the hell, once a professional always a suit.

The sprightly young lady, the anchor asked sprightly young questions, which were answered strictly according to one’s calling. If you were a politician your answers were political (the Congress spokesperson defending his government, the others attacking it.) If you were a TV ‘expert,’ you answered with measured indignation about the general political apathy and added the completely unoriginal thought that all political parties were alike and the pox on all of them.

The third component of the crowd, the man in the street, invited now to be the man in the restaurant and who hoped to be the man in the restaurant with a mike, found that it wasn’t coming in his direction, which agitated him enough to grab one and give everyone enough proof as to why the mike wasn’t offered to him to start with.

There were more like him after the show who wound up, complaining bitterly that they hadn’t come in the rain only to be part of the scenery. Also complaining was a young man vaguely connected with films (which is why he wore a tee shirt two sizes too small for him) who was upset that the programme had given too much play to undeserving politicians. Had he known this earlier, he said, he wouldn’t have lent his name to the programme. I quickly took one of the production assistants aside. “What’s his name?”I asked. She didn’t know either.

Do these programmes do any good? Do they throw any light on subjects hitherto dark and murky and make them as clear as day? Is there a resultant shift in voter royalties so that a BJP man watching the programme says, ‘Wow. That Congressman knows his stuff,’ and promptly votes for him? Somehow I doubt it.

But we still go through this exercise year in, year out. Perhaps there is a cumulative effect; perhaps one’s sensible — why even brilliant — ideas, so succinctly expressed, ultimately find their way past the coiled labyrinths of prejudice in voters’ minds, so that years and years from now, they will all go into the polling booth, and learn to press the right buttons.