This morning at 8am, I got on my old scooter and drove down to the local polling booth in Kalyani Nagar, here in Poona. It took two hours, which consisted of long periods of waiting, due to fellow voters apparent lack of familiarity with queues, frantic attempts to decipher long voter lists in devanagari, a lot of running around the Nagarwala school campus and, finally, casting my ballot on an electronic voting machine. But for whatever it’s worth, I voted. And I’m glad that I did.

My one single vote is not likely to make a huge difference—representative democracy can be humbling that way, but I would like to think that I’ve done something to help get my city back on track. As I mentioned in a comment on the BBC Have Your Say website today, infrastructure is the defining problem here. Our streets are constantly potholed and falling apart, power cuts are a daily occurrence and the occasional water shortage is expected. On top of that, other than a relatively small, not too well maintained fleet of buses, our city lacks decent public transport, which, like all Indian cities, it sorely needs. One of the ‘top priorities’ of the candidate I voted for is to build a Delhi-like metro.

So, I do hope that Arun Bhatia, the gentleman I voted for, is elected in our constituency and things slowly start to improve. Although I’m not sure what his chances of winning are, he did get the third most votes (or 7% of all votes) in the last election.

Here’s a photo of my indelible ink-stained finger:

Poonaites: Elections begin day-after tomorrow. I’m voting for the People’s Guardian Party (Arun Bhatia). Help us get an independent candidate—who’s worked with the UN and has concrete plans to get this city’s infrastructure back on track (see http://tinyurl.com/top-priorities), and whose finances are public—elected in our constituency.

The lesser evil argument (voting for the more secular of the two mainstream parties) might seem like the way to go, but why keep sacrificing our constituency in an attempt to more precisely determine our national government? Coalitions are here to stay. A party that more closely reflects your values will enter into a coalition with the mainstream party that more closely reflects those very values.

So, vote for a candidate or party you believe in (or would like to believe in), and vote independent, because all the mainstream parties, whether you’d like to admit it or not, have a track record of violence and corruption, which should automatically disqualify them in our books, given that non-violence is the one most important value our country was founded on.

But most importantly, vote.