Obama, No soup for you!

Arizona State University my Alma mater recently created a controversy of sorts when they decided not to give an honorary degree to President Obama. He has been invited to give the commencement address at their spring commencement ceremony in the month of May this year.

Many universities do have their own traditions which include giving honorary degrees to invited guests. However, I tend to agree with ASU in this case. Nevertheless there has been a big hue and cry regarding this with university being pushed on the back foot.

The reason given for this alleged Faux Pas is that Obama's body of work is yet to come. Which in my opinion is correct. Let's face it, the only notable achievement that President Obama has to his credit is running a very successful election campaign and occupying the esteemed office. When I say this, I say it in no demeaning way. I expect him to succeed, I want him to succeed. We all need him to be the best president in these challenging times.

But before we start showering the rewards and honors, don't we need to see his "Body of Work". There is no reason to make a rock-star out of him just due to the resentment targeted against his predecessor. We need to give him time to see if he can measure up to our expectations and only then we should judge him. "Yes we can" was a nice campaign slogan, whether it gets converted to "Yes we did" remains to be seen.

The Power of One Vote

India goes in for general elections on April 16th. It is our duty to make sure that each one of us goes to the polling booth and exercise our vote.

In recent times many people in urban India tend to give arguments that all politician are bad and nobody deserves the vote. What we need to realize here is, that they are bad because we chose them so over the years. We ourselves our responsible for them. At some point in time we decided to overlook merit and chose Film stars, Wives & sons, and most of all criminals to represent us. To change this, we consistently need to choose the better candidates in successive elections. We need to choose people who address the real issues of inclusive development. Then maybe in a few years, we would start liking our politicians and they would again become the true representatives.

A vote provides us the power to judge the performance of our representative and the power to choose the correct person, lets not waste it. After all in the words of Spider man's Uncle:

"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility"