WATCH: Politicians, in a word

With a month left for the Delhi assembly elections, this exercise was an effort to get an peek into people’s perception of leaders contending for the position of the chief minister of Delhi. Respondents were asked about Sheila Dikshit, Dr Harsh Vardhan and Arvind Kejriwal. Azaan Javaid reports.

Word association is generally defined as a spontaneous reaction in the form of a word, as a response to a given word. We tried a variation of this social experiment when instead of the giving a word, we named a politician and asked people to tell us the first word that came to their minds.

With a month left for the Delhi assembly elections, the exercise was an effort to get an peek into people’s perception of leaders contending for the position of the chief minister of Delhi.

Respondents were asked about Sheila Dikshit, Dr Harsh Vardhan and Arvind Kejriwal. The responses were insightful at times, but in some instances were plain condescending, with one of the respondents even using the word ‘ugly’ (guess for whom).

Arvind Kejriwal was the favourite, especially among the youth, while the same cannot be said about Sheila Dikshit. While some praised the chief minister’s developmental work, others were not impressed with the corruption scandals under her government which have been in the news.

For the BJP, the news is no better, with a major portion of people having no idea who the BJP candidate was.

Of course, there were some who did not prefer to be interviewed at all. The exercise did not go down well with one particular respondent, who yelled -- propaganda!