Why do people get upset when a politician visits their city and causes them to be late for a few appointments? That thought kept nagging at me a few weeks ago, when the honourable Prime Minister took time off from his extremely busy schedule of inaugurating projects around the country to inaugurate a few projects in Bombay. A lot of people were stuck in traffic for a while, apparently, and public transport was affected for a few hours, which prompted them to start complaining about how this has never happened before. I must admit their attitude disappointed me.

Yes, we have never shut down services for a visiting Prime Minister in our history, until now, but does that mean we never should? If we stick to tradition and never change, how will all our cities turn into Smart Cities within the next 400 years? It is our mindset, stuck in the past, that prevents us from ushering in the future and I, for one, am strongly opposed to this. Those complaints also upset me because they reminded me of just how selfish so many of our countrymen can be. A few hundred of them must have reached home late from work, perhaps. Some of them may have missed a couple of meetings, or been late for visits to the hospital, but aren’t these minor inconveniences when one takes the larger picture into account? We have a politician from Delhi visiting us, and that should be an occasion for joy, not rancour.