Next time there’s Election Results Day, especially if it falls on a Sunday, try this experiment: don’t follow the counting and non-stop banter that goes in the name of punditry on TV and online. If you’re an advertiser, then let someone in your team give you a 4-hourly WhatsApp message (phone calls are too intrusive) about how tight or loose the race is going. That way, you’ll get a fair idea, without being bombarded with tawdry details, about how many viewers may catch your product-messaging. But if you’re not an advertiser, do what you, a civilised person, do on a weekend, especially if it happens to be a winter weekend: relax, go on a long drive, binge-watch a web series, marinate at a bar, play a round of golf or whatever competitive sport you play outside your profession…. In other words, ignore the longer-than-a-Test-cricket day business of following election results.
It may seem that tracking the voting counts are vitally important. But the truth is, unless you’re getting paid to be a talking head in a studio, or a politician who has a stake in the poll results, or a laddoo merchant who needs to know which party will be ordering in bulk during different parts of the day as the numbers keep piling up, following poll results real time is of no consequence. Instead, just know about it with a clear head the next day in the neatness of a newspaper.
