Students of semiotics, the discipline regarding the social and philosophical implication of symbols, might well ponder as to what extent AAP’s electioneering emblem of the jharoo helped it make an almost totally clean sweep in the Delhi polls. Be it never so humble, the jharoo, the subcontinental cousin of the western broomstick, or besom, represents well-ordered, dust-free domesticity. Sceptics may scoff that, unlike the more up-to-date vacuum cleaner, the jharoo doesn’t remove dust but reallocates it, but such negativity is easily countered by the desi broom’s economical, electricity-free eco-friendliness. When the occasion demands, it has also been known to do double duty as an instrument of corporal chastisement meted out by irate womenfolk to errant male members of their community as a rough-and-ready antidote to bibulous behavior and set them back on the straight and narrow path of abstemious sobriety.
Brooms have made their literary mark as well, and long before Harry Potter established them as a wizardly form of transportation, Swift penned a satirical `Meditation’ in which he likened archetypal Man to a Broomstick which “sets out to be a universal Reformer and Corrector of Abuse, a Remover of Grievances… bringing hidden Corruptions to the Light, and raises a mighty Dust.” Such artful analogies may or may not have lent motivational mojo to the Capital’s electorate, but vote-ever the reason, Kejri’s jharoo has won the stamp of AAProval at the hustings.
