Today, our relative and neighbor shared an important document
with me via WhatsApp.
He asked to check if my family’s names were there in the “Directory”
– actually the “Voters' list” pertaining to our ward & locality.
The document was 257 pages and I felt it would be pretty
challenging to fish out our names.
Many thoughts crossed my mind and I learned some lessons too in
my quest to search.
First things first.
I first thought- Is this the correct list?
Assuming that our relative, who has political affiliation, knows
better and thus he has shared, I confidently started searching in the “Names” column.
My strategy was- Search for “Sabat” in the list.
There are a few surnames ending with “t” in Odia language viz.
Rout, Mohanty…
The search was on for “Sabat”.
As I scrolled pages after pages, I realized that so many people
are there in my locality, and hence in the list.
I admired the neat work of all our Govt officials and teachers, who
had sincerely undertaken the Census study and enumeration, and had
painstakingly documented particulars.
I felt technically challenged while handling the document in my
mobile phone. I did not know how to use Control+F- that is used to find
something in Word file while using the computer.
It came to my mind- Had I known how to find, searching would
have been easy and I would not have to go through the grind!
Names were listed along with relation and age and also the Voter Id Card details. There were 9 columns in all! There is so
much data about us in the public space!
