The absence of choice is a circumstance that is very, very rare

By this reckoning, even Hobson's choice is a choice! And the world over the common
man, more often than not, faces Hobson's choice. He can either take what he is offered,
on those very rare occasions when he is offered something, or leave it. For instance, a
highly educated young man is offered a job and a pay both of which would seem to mime
his academic achievements. What is the choice before him? He can either accept the offer
or reject it. By no species of courtesy can that be described as a choice.
Not long ago there was a report in newspapers that some highly qualified Indian medical
practitioners, who had gone to a Western country after signing a job contract, were eking
out their lives by dusting tables in restaurants! Could they have settled for such menial
work out of choice? On the contrary, if they had had one, they would perhaps have
returned to their country to set up practice. By the same token, a sizable section of people
in the advanced countries live on doles because they have no jobs. Are they exercising
their choice?
However, in the domains of politics and administration, not to speak of big business,
there is always a multiplicity of choices. Politicians can switch from one party to another
with a straight face. The party that has grazing, so to speak, and can offer a public office
readily embraces such defectors. Ideological allegiances and political convictions are all
fictions created to fool the electorate. There are multiple parties in most democracies, and
each one of them is eager to swell its ranks. Politicians, therefore, see no merit in sticking
to a party on whose tickets they may have got elected but which is in no position to yield
any material benefits. Coalition governments would otherwise not be possible. Besides,
no field offers as many opportunities for making as much money as politics does. And
those who are in politics are not motivated by considerations of public service. They want
to make as much money as they can while they can, and then vanish from the scene. This
may not be true of all democracies, but it is certainly true of most democracies.
Similarly, bureaucrats seldom, if ever, are without a choice. They may quit government
service any time they like because they invariably have waiting for them cushy jobs in
the private sector in return for the services rendered to individual companies while in the
employ of the government. Even those who retire from government service take up much
better jobs in the private sector the next day, again as a quid pro quo for the services
rendered. And many of those government officials who are sacked for disobeying their
political masters could not care less because they will by then have built a neat nest egg.
Therefore, it is the common people who are almost always without a choice, except
perhaps that between life and death. Some of them exercise that choice, but that is no
choice at all. It is pure sophistry to say that choices have diminished with steep increase
in the population of the world. That does not answer the question why the available
choices cannot be equitably distributed among all people.
To put it bluntly, some sections of modern society have monopolized all choices to the
detriment of the individual. Society now decides who shall have what. What it does not

realize until it is faced with an explosive situation is that it had an obligation to ensure
that every individual member had a choice in all matters, and that it had failed to fulfill
that obligation. When such of its members as have no choice, except political choice
which does not mean much in the absence of economic choice, feel forced to resort to
violence, the self-same society accuses them of trying to destabilize it.
In sum, absence of choice is what the masses the world over have learnt to live with, and
exercise of choice has become the prerogative of the rich and the influential, politicians,
bureaucrats and Big Business.