General Secretary: Why? What? How?

Quite a lot of people have asked me one of these questions, multitude of times. Both before and after the elections. Thinking back I realize that it wasn't a well thought of decision. Yes! I admit it. I put everything at stake and that too for an election, wherein whether I won or lost, the rest of my BITSian CDC/UC life would have been nightmarish. It is a good thing that I couldn't think this clearly then :D

So why did I do it? I do have a bunch of prepared reasons to throw at your average interviewer, but I have to be honest here. It just felt like the right thing to do. That's it. It wasn't like I was convinced that I'd be the best there ever was, ever will be. Not that I didn't want that, but that's not the point. Was it ambition? Was it the the cliched "I want to change the system". To an extent yes.

The thing is one can never know for sure, in a situation like this. One cannot say whether one's convictions will fail, whether one will give in to temptation, whether one will be complacent. If you had asked me then, my answer would have been HELL NO! But if you had asked me then, whether after a year, I would remain true to myself, and I had given you an honest answer, it would be, "I hope not."

The point I want to make here is that no matter how good or how bad a person seems, one can never be sure whether he will change, whether he will be the best President/General Secretary, because he doesn't know it himself. He may be the best candidate, but the best post-holder?? You can't say. Now this is a property of democracy, that the person who seems most confident, most suitable to the people gets elected.

So finally it just comes down to convictions.

On a lighter note:
The irony of the whole matter is that I had initially wanted to contest for President and then due to unprecedented circumstances, I withdrew and filed for General Secretary. But the most eventful, the most testing period of my tenure was when I was a stand-in President during the election time.

Another weird thing is that for the first month I was handling both these posts. Later after the elections, Ravi Teja was handling both, and now when finally things seem to have settled, Ravi gets injured and Vijay handles both. Is there a jinx that I'm not aware of here?