A few filmmakers are terribly upset the President of India didn’t personally hand over the national awards they won. They just boycotted the event. A few others attended the event and accepted the awards from the I&B minister. The event is over, but now everyone is fighting over why the few pricey, arrogant, pain-in-the-ass variety filmmakers skipped the function.
Now these filmmakers may have felt insulted or disappointed. They have their reasons for that. But President Ram Nath Kovind has his reasons for scaling down his presence too.
Nobody is speaking for the President, so I have decided to take up that onerous task.
Kovind is the President of India, the world’s largest democracy. He is the commander in chief of the world’s fourth largest army. In the pantheon of world leaders he is right there along with Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, etc. What I mean to say is, he is a busy man.
So busy he has so far not been able to explore the Rs 16,000 crore palace he lives in. At 2 lakh square feet, his house is several times larger than the Lulu Mall many of you silly Mallus go to on weekends and during vacations. There are 340 rooms there, most of the times he gets lost I guess, it is humanly not possible to know exactly where these 340 rooms are. The bigger trouble is he has over 750 employees, there have been presidents who completed their terms without getting to know the names of even 10 of them.
This is in addition to a 13 acre garden, swimming pool, golf course, football field, tennis courts and other random stuff that needs to be taken care of. Yes, there are many caretakers there, but there are so many of them, they too need some care-taking.
That is not all. Every now and then a file lands up from the Union govt or the 29 state govts or the 7 centrally administered territories. They need to be signed, most of the times he doesn’t even have to read them. On some occasions he needs to seek the advice of the home ministry, which tells him what to do. The trouble is when he gets files he needs to sit on. There are quite a few of them, they are kept in another room. Sometimes the files stay there for such a long time, the staff forgets where they kept it, and a search is needed.
The President also has to host dinner and lunch for visiting dignitaries. Preparations for these begin months in advance. What cutlery to use for example. If you need to snub someone, serve them food in stainless steel plates. Or serve just dhoklas and masala dosas to a guest who relishes non-vegetarian food. This is how diplomatic messages are put across. A lot of thought goes into all of this.
Now you might ask how past presidents found time to hand over awards. They were too old to do any of this work.
The current president we have is putting a value to time. No waste of unnecessary time. Conferring one award would take one minute, so 137 of them would mean more than 2 hours. Now tell me friends how does he find time for this after all the work he has to do.
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