A dynamic, middle-aged man, best known for successfully launching India’s first low-cost airline, is looking to Mahatma Gandhi and Buddha for inspiration for his current, seemingly-whimsical venture. His endeavor: getting elected to the Lok Sabha as an Independent from the Bangalore South constituency, spending only the stipulated Rs 25 lakh.

Gorur Ramaswamy Gopinath, 57, founder of Air Deccan, openly admits that he can well afford to splurge on his campaign from the proceeds of his airline sale and indulge in a bit of expensive election skullduggery. “If I spend a few million dollars, I’m as bad as the others because my political life has started with a lie,” he says. Gopinath wants to keep within the EC-dictated Rs 25 lakh. That is where Buddha and Gandhi come in.

Both were motivational thinkers who kindled people’s emotions with the power of ideas, he says. “If Buddha and Gandhi could succeed in stirring the masses with no money, no internet, Facebook or Twitter, no media, what am I complaining about?”

Like millions of educated, middle class Indians Gopinath said that he too was a passive onlooker until recently. One evening, as he sat sipping whiskey in his bungalow, fulminating inwardly about the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the assault on women in pubs, Gopinath said he was struck by Gandhi’s aphorism, ‘Be the change you want to see’. “I decided that I had to hurl myself into politics,” he said.

Swapping the Gandhian loincloth for linen shirts, and Gandhi’s journeys in third-class compartments for rides in buses, Gopinath said he wants to trigger a movement of change against casteist, communal, corrupt politics.

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