Political Oration as a skill, and an art finds its root to the Greeks, where experiments in a Republic required appealing speeches to be delivered to shape public opinions among masses. It found its greatest influence during the era of the Roman republic, where the orators in the senate shaped the future of the western civilized world, influencing the senators, as well as the masses, changing the history of three continents.
The roman model of the senate was replicated worldwide as parliaments and legislative buildings in democracies, where elected representatives, continued the tradition of collective decision making, through building opinion and shaping policies.
Around two decades and a half back, I was also to be enthralled by the art of political oration, by one of the most gifted natural speakers of modern politics, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Listening to his debates and speeches and the odd humors, public oration did what it was meant to do, develop a political allegiance and shape a political philosophy in my young mind. It was also a period, where technology was taking over our lives. The reach of televisions and news papers were expanding, often bringing us in touch with local politics across the states.
Being from a heavily multicultural state, some of the early political philosophies of the party were at variance with my own values, which prompted my mind to develop a future course of trail that the party needed to reform through, again with the moderate face of the party symbolized by Vajpayee spurring hope of a reform in the political philosophy of the only party that promised to give a political alternative at the center.
Half way through the journey of my political affiliations, my own ideals were irritated by the abundant number of political garbage that seems to stem from fanatic ideologies still thriving in the party. Thus the expansive reach of television delivered before me a speech from a local leader of the party. I was filled with revulsion. I asked myself, why do the party fill themselves with such uncultured filth? Technology was moving to a stage that I view as the "calculator phase" of social influence, where media technology made it more efficient for our political exposure to be widened across the nation. However, this was still an era where our mind had, still to form the ideals and philosophies, making judgments and opinions on our won, merely using technology to enhance the efficiency and pace with which we form our ideologies.
A decade and few years have passed since witnessing that piece of dirty talk that they call as oration. I witness today that we move to a phase of social life called the "artificial intelligence phase" or the "micro processor phase", where the role of our minds seems to have been taken over by media technology. Opinions are already processed, and formed and manipulated and fed to us. We shall choose not to deviate, our brains are of little significance is forming ideologies, they are merely pre-processed and available as inputs to us. Those who control the inputs control us, and our ideologies. Our minds and its application is architectured out of the ideology formation process. Mass media replaces political oration. The masses now get controlled rather than influenced.
I witness today, the same speaker I loathed over a decade back for his filthy style, the center of attraction of this mass media, delivering his average speeches across the border, the evaluation of the speeches as masterpieces already manipulated by technology and fed to the masses to gobble up, the target, educated or not ever so willing to oblige. There is an attempt to keep out the natural savagery of his earlier speeches with careful choice of words. But a lack of focus and substance, and a motive rather than inspiration as the base of the speeches, make even these carefully crafted speeches as mere average work by professional public relations and marketing strategists.
Today we live in an era, where the sound of a trained parrot is hailed as a wonder of nature, a world moved far apart from that which immersed themselves in the creative imagination of the lines that romanticized the song of the cuckoo. So it is of little surprise, that I find among us, even among the most educated of the masses, a lot of people, endorsing average speeches as masterpieces, surrendering themselves and their opinions to that fed by the mass media, reluctant, or unable to form their own opinions, living in a spoon fed world where technology has taken over our thoughts, unable to form their own ideologies.
Today I crave for the birth of our own Cicero, to reinvent the art of political oration. To overpower the grip of mass media, and to spark to life the dead corpses that our minds have become, from the simple machinery that our ideology have become to the evolving life that once our political landscape was.
