If you aspire to become a politician in India, you must have the following qualifications, delineated in great detail in the Indian Constitution (which, I am to understand, has been amended 115 times since 1950):
1. You must be illiterate and uneducated, since education has the unforgivable tendency to make your mind receptive to reason and other such things that are harmful to the base and the feral in you. If you've known right from your childhood that acting on emotions and impulses is the right way to do things, and that thinking is an encumbrance of which all humans must endeavor to relieve themselves, you're made of the right stuff.
2. You must have an extensive criminal record, having preferably murdered at least 10 people and stolen money from 100. Unlike the first qualification (since literacy and education are by no means a guarantee that you've been defiled by the insidious psychic influence of logic), this one is absolutely essential, since the fundamental purpose of the government rests on it. Any politician who doesn't know how to extort money from citizens for his personal benefit or to use the law and the police force to his personal advantage ought to be ashamed of himself.
3. You must be an expert at directing ad-hominem speeches at illiterate crowds during election time, since they are the only ones who would ever elect you into office. You may think that this job requires more brain cells than you have at your disposal, but it really is simple: all you have to do is to shut your mind totally to reason and logic, open your mouth, and start talking passionately without any thought whatever. Political speeches aren't meant to make sense. If they were, they would be delivered in classrooms and lecture halls. You don't have to worry about your audience not understanding you - they don't need to. They're going to vote for you anyway. And it's imperative that you do everything in your power to keep the illiterate masses of India illiterate, since they are the only ones who are ignorant enough to vote in the first place.
4. You must learn to be a religious zealot. It doesn't matter which religion. Two decades ago, being a Hindu zealot might have been more profitable than being a Muslim zealot, but it's not so today. Pick a religion at random, and babble fundamentalist sophistry at every opportunity you get. The key is to infuriate the zealots in rival camps, so that communal violence breaks out all over the country, and all the money that others have worked hard to earn and which you have scrupulously stolen from them by means of taxes gets wasted, and those of you who pretend to be economists don't have to rack your brains, trying to think of ways in which to spend that money without benefiting the citizens in any way, once you have stowed the greater portion of it away in secret banks.
5. If there's any kind of moral corruption or debauchery that I've omitted to mention here because of my limited capacity as a non-politician to conceive of it, feel free to add it to this list. Remember, more corruption means that you're better qualified to rule this country, so don't feel forced by society into hiding your savage, barbaric depravity under a veneer of non-politician-ness. Embrace your true, animal nature.
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