This is the season of arrogance. The capital’s elections were fought on the platform of arrogance and a bunch of politicians were elevated because they lacked it and others were dumped as they had too much of it.

Nobody sees it but it exists in perception. And elections are fought on perception.

A common dictionary defines arrogance as haughtiness, conceit, hubris, self-importance, egotism or simply a of sense of superiority.

Those who are aloof are described as arrogant and that is the simplest deduction. But we exhibit all of dictionary meaning and more, and still nothing will change but us. However, if a public figure is branded as arrogant then they may forfeit an important election and an image. The damage caused to a public figure is more than it makes sense to you and me.

The Congress party is going through one of these phases. It is in the process of forgetting its history and the purpose it was founded.

Former MP Sandeep Dikshit on Friday criticized the way Congress is run saying its "elitist" culture produces "arrogance" and it doesn't have "genuine" leaders.

He has cautioned the party against becoming a "copy cat" of either BJP on issues relating to secularism or the AAP on economic issues."50% of seniors in Congress is deadwood and 70% in NSUI and Youth Congress", said the son of former chief minister Sheila Dikshit.

"The culture (in Congress) has become elitist and arrogance grows from it. Our cadres are uncomfortable in such a situation," he said.

Even a seasoned and intelligent politician like Jairam Ramesh has joined this bandwagon. “We have to be less arrogant and pre-occupied with ourselves,” Ramesh said this week.

“We need new, energetic faces that carry credibility and can communicate. We need faces that are not arrogant. We put far too much importance on individuals but we need to get our structures right. The belief that an individual has a magic wand is wrong,” was Ramesh’s refrain.

Our humble Arvind Kejriwal added his confession to this debate on arrogance. After swearing in as Delhi chief minister on Saturday he said “We will have to constantly introspect... If arrogance creeps in, we will not be able to fulfill our mission.”
 
In his book 'Problem People: And How to Deal with Them’ author Peter Honey says “arrogant people are non-learners. They invest their energies in maintaining a cozy feeling of complacency, and complacency is the biggest single enemy to the process of continuously learning from experience. Arrogant people are exactly the sort of people who are destined to have one year's experience 20 times rather than 20 years' worth of experience.”

Can we disagree? No, we cannot. Arrogance does not allow us to grow, in values and in intelligence. To be relevant we need to be humble. That will at least lead us to people who have wisdom since we lack wisdom or lack the ability to recognize existence of wisdom.