Rahul Gandhi and Xeno’s Paradox

Zeno’s paradox basically states that an object moving towards its destination will never reach it because at every stage it has to first reach the halfway mark between its current position and the destination and as such, since there is an infinite number of halfway points, it will never reach its destination.

Such is the case with Indian National Congress’s heir apparent and his “coming of age”.

For the past decade and more, every year there are a bunch of articles on his “uprising”, “coming of age”, “resurrection”, “version 2.0”, “evolution”, “metamorphosis”, “phoenix moment”, and every other synonym you could think of.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

A. Summer of 2009

It all started with two innocuous and well-timed articles in Economic Times (Rahul Gandhi: A coming-of-age) and NDTV (Has Rahul Gandhi come of age?), during the May 2009 elections. It was preceded by a similar article in BBC a few days ago (Coming of age of Rahul Gandhi) and succeeded next month by another piece projecting him as India’s future PM by Reuters (Is Rahul Gandhi prime minister material?).

All of them carry an eerily similar tone — Rahul Gandhi, like the natural successor to a family business, is now ready to lead the world’s largest democracy.