Yes!! We did!!

Vote. I mean. I must say that the democratic process was not so painful for us as it is made out to be. Fill in forms on Jaago re. Submit it in the ARO office off 100ft Road, check lists online a week before the D-day, remember your serial number, go and vote! :) Simple, right?

It was a mandatory election-day off today. We left home around 10.30 AM thinking that the polling booth on Wind Tunnel Road was ours. It was not to be. We were told to go to the one near Manipal Hospital. Since we started off walking (the rains over the last 4 days have made us treat the sun with impunity;) ). So we decided to walk it out. We stopped on the way for a cool Mango milkshake and the neighborhood bakery and set off again.

We reached the SDA school on Airport road, only to find that even this was not our booth. It was one that was further down the by-lane right behind Manipal Hospital. There were two tables outside every booth, presumably, Congress/BJP/JDS workers helping people find their names in the list. We had checked our names online, but the PDF file online didn't have our names, just the search showed up with both our names. And these guys just had a print out of the names. So, we were in doubt now. Will the polling officers have our names at least? Or are they also carrying the outdated lists?

We went into the school. This PS had the longest line of all the polling booths we stopped by!! So we decided to wait hoping that at the end of the wait we will be able to vote. Meanwhile I saw one of the school ayah's cleaning and separating seeds from fresh tamarind. Looked around and found a tamarind tree sure enough. Went looking for fallen tamarinds and found one nice one on a bench and came back and enjoyed it. It reminded me of school when my sis and I would collect tamarinds beating them off trees with stones in case my Dad was running late to pick us up :D


Finally went in after about a 45 minute wait. Thankfully we knew our serial numbers from checking online and it was a short 2-3 minute search for the polling officers to lok up both names. I am damn sure it would have been a mess in case we didn't pay attention to those and didn't have that info handy. Got the ink (which seems to be the new fashion statement) and the 2 seconds time in the secret ballot, with the electronic voting machine.

Came back home using GPS trying to find ourselves a shortcut through Rustam Bagh since walking back all the way on airport road seemed daunting. Trespassed through one small apartment complex to cross over from Rustam Bagh into our area and were home in like 10 minutes stopping for egg puffs on the way.

All in all, a great experience. I have to appreciate a good government experience when I come across it, since it is a rare find ;)

And I voted, exercised the most fundamental responsibility of my citizenship :) Hopefully next time there will be better choices. And hopefully tomorrow we will be better off for it.