"Who would you vote for?" an interviewer asked a certain woman in the United States just before an election. "I'd go for Berkeley," came the prompt reply. "But all the time," said the interviewer, "you have been condemning Berkeley as a great scoundrel. And now you say that you'll vote for him again. Has he done something especially great to change your opinion?"

"Nothing of the sort," answered the lady, quite in her senses. "It's just that I don't want another good man to turn into a scoundrel. One is quite enough. And so I'll vote for Berkeley. Let him represent us in Congress till the devil takes care of him."

John Donne, the 17th century English poet, wanted to know the whereabouts of some woman who would be both beautiful and faithful. On second thoughts, he dropped the idea. "By the time I make my pilgrimage to her," he wrote in a poem, "she would have ceased to be faithful."

No comment on women, but every five years -- and now with greater frequency -- we, the people of India, are asked to make the choice between Tweedledums and Tweedledees. We don't want Berkeleys to go on representing us in our Parliament. Nor do we want to go on a pilgrimage to Mount Parnassus or to Mount Kailash, where the gods and goddesses take up residence when they finish with their sport with us.

"Why have you called me?" I asked the great Parliamentarian who was president of a live-wire organisation called the Indian Association of Parliamentarians on Problems of Population and Development (IAPPD). He gave me a long filmi harangue on the role of writers in the affairs of the nation. Then he finally came to the point: he needed a souvenir to be made for his annual conference, and he looked forward to handing me this prestigious responsibility. The prime minister was to inaugurate the conference. The speaker of the Lok Sabha was to deliver the keynote address. Ministers and MPs from several states were to participate, besides the top guns from the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). The last-named were part-financiers of the conference, and part-beneficiaries, inasmuch as such conferences provide the raison d'etre for their existence.

That the conference would be an epoch-making event in the parliamentary history of India was repeatedly impressed upon me. The souvenir had to be top-notch. The front cover was to carry the photo of the prime minister and a little below and a little smaller was to be the photo of the IAPPD president himself. The back cover was to carry an appropriate quote from the Father of the Nation. The most important thing was that after releasing the souvenir, the prime minister should return home a happy man.

I did my job to the best of my ability. The prime minister, I should think, went back home a happy man. So did all those big brothers who had flown in from New York. But after its release by the prime minister, the souvenir was not distributed.

Nothing suspicious about that. There was another conference coming up in Beijing, with a high-level delegation from India. The subject was the same -- Population and Development. So was the sponsor UNFPA. The delegates had been selected, mostly legislators. Some of them had failed to send advertisements of the companies they owned, secretly or otherwise. It amounted to lakhs. It amounted to cheating. Their inclusion in the delegation was contingent upon the specific understanding that their ads for the souvenir could be taken for granted. The delegation, as it was initially constituted, did go to Beijing. The souvenir, too, was finally distributed.

Where did the money come from? Who paid whom? Everybody knows, not just the Tweedledums and Tweedledees. The rest of us know too.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.