Daddy, what is politics?

It was the question I’d always dreaded.

The kid tugged on my shirt-sleeve. “Daddy, what is politics?”

Perhaps I should have been more concerned at his use of the word “Daddy” (I’d never seen this kid before in my life), but for reasons I will go on to explain, it was the second part of his sentence that loosened the glue in my spinal chord.

I gulped. “Er, I’m busy. Ask your mother.”

The kid’s mother, it turned out, was apolitical. Just my luck.

“OK,” I began, “politics… Politics is power. And decisions. Power and decisions. Oh, and compromise. And persuasion, of course. Not to mention bargaining, horse trading, pork barrels, and all that stuff. Politics is money. Lots and lots of money. Lots and lots of daddy’s money that he wanted to spend on a new sports car. Politics is about who gets shafted, when, where, how and why are you asking me anyway?”

I looked down but the kid was gone.

The next few nights I didn’t sleep a wink or a smile. The kid’s question was eating away at my brain like a hamster with the munchies. 4am, Thursday, I called my editor on the scarlet hotphone bolted to my bedside table.

“It’s me.”

“Of course it is. What other schmuck would call at this hour? Don’t tell me you’ve been kidnapped again?”

I thought I heard a note of enthusiasm creep into his voice.

“No. I need some money.”

A decidedly nasal intonation parped back at me. “Sorry. You’ve got the wrong number.”

“But chief, I’ve got an itch.”

“Buy some cream.”

“No. I mean I’ve got to get out there and find some answers. I’ve been pole-axed by a five-year-old, chief – you know what that’s like. Kid’s asking what politics is. Thinks I’m the man to tell him.”

This was the kind of stuff that got my boss salivating. This and raw meat. Ten hours later I was in the baggage claims department of Washington, Dulles. I climbed out of my suitcase and followed the scent of burning tax dollars. I had one question on my mind, though numerically speaking, that was nothing new.

“So,” I said to Senator Dan Dee (Rep. Taxes) as I loafed back in his plush red leather chair, hoisted my hush puppies up on his desk and sucked on my Havana cigar, “how about you spill the beans: just what is politics?”

Dee wiped his lips with his colossal forearm. “Look, moron,” he began, using my pen-name, “I’m a public servant…”

“Wotto, Jeeves,” I teased. “How about fixing me another tipple?”

“…but I don’t believe in public service,” Dee continued, torpedoing my Bertie Wooster routine. “I’m anti-government and proud of it. I got into politics in order to get people like me out of it. Politics is a job.”

I gazed around his palatial office, admiring a portrait of Benjamin Franklin that glared menacingly back down at me.

“So, limited government, large office?” I said in a finely cut Jeffersonian accent. “Is that politics?”

“You’d better believe it,” he spluttered.

A vision of the kid’s face entered my mental slide show. How could I tell the poor little mite? He’d never trust a politician again.

“To the future,” said Dee, raising a bottle.

“There’s no future for you,” I said, somewhat ruining the moment. “Your kind are all washed up.” I tied my shoelaces and swiftly exited the seat of power.

Washington, as the founding fathers were fond of saying, was getting me nowhere. Fed up with sclerotic has-been democracies, I took the first available flight to a country that was going places. A few time-zones later, I was being assaulted in Delhi airport.

“My dearest friend,” said a man trying to relieve me of my travel bag, “I thought you’d never visit us again.”

“So, this is where all our jobs are going,” I said, admiring my surroundings.

India, for those of you stuck in the 19th century, is a strange hybrid of capitalist enterprise and lack of drains. It reminded me of my old bedroom.

After a few minutes of intense haggling, I found myself perched in my dearest friend’s rickshaw. “Your country takes my breath away,” I told him.

He sighed. “Yes, I’m afraid the pollution is a real problem.”

I told him to put a sock in it and take me to someone who could tell me what politics is. He knew just the man.

Jugdish Ganguly is India’s foremost software tycoon and tipped to be the next Bill Gates.

“But are you nerdy enough for the job?” I planned to ask him before I met him face-to-face and realised there was no need.

So I got straight to the point. I asked him what politics means to him.

“Politics is Kashmir,” he said, in a statement of such profundity I almost fell off my bed of nails. “Business is business. And never the twain shall meet.”

“Who’s Twain? CIA?”

“Bottom line: I don’t need government. Government needs me.”

“Quit abstracting. Elaborate or I’m gone,” I said, laying on the charm.

“OK. Look at me: I am not a King, nor am I a white man.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “And?”

“My rise to excessive riches has relied not on politics.”

“Then on what?”

“Enterprise. I am neither Hindu, nor Muslim, nor Christian. Religion, see, is bad business. Religion is politics. Politics is bad business. Business is bad politics. Bad business is religion. Religion is not only bad politics but bad business and therefore not even very good religion. Are you getting this down?”

“It’s all in here,” I said, pointing past my head at a copy of his autobiography lying on a shelf.

“I was born on the streets of Bombay,” Ganguly boasted. “I built my first computer out of raw sewage. Politics is for fat people who still read Sanskrit. My generation chooses business. Business and Pepsi.”

“You mean politics is dead?” I panicked.

“As Mahatma Gandhi,” he grinned.

“What’ll I tell the kid?”

“Tell him to grow up,” Ganguly said as we gazed out the window into the fading light of a Delhi sunset.