It all started with the country’s collective frustration against the existing system, that’s India Against Corruption garnered support and grew as a movement. Three musketeers emerged from the movement, namely Prashant Bhushan, Yogendra Yadav and Arvind Kejriwal. Over the next few months, we supported them in the hope that they would change the political landscape of India.

We thought that with such educated professionals entering politics, there was hope for people like you and me to also enter politics and help change India.

Cut to 2014, Delhi reposed its faith on the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and gave them an overwhelming mandate. People like me, who had donated, who had worked and who had supported AAP, at least on social-networking platforms, were overjoyed. It was all too good to be true.

My dad still didn’t support AAP. He said we should wait and watch. He said, “I have seen the JP [Jaiprakash Narayan] movement fail badly, even they were aam janta but their egos inflated after tasting power and they went down the path of self-destruction.”

I was still smug and said we possibly can’t go wrong this time because it’s people like me who are part of the movement. Surelt, we can very well manage our egos for the country.

It took less than a month to prove that elders do know all. The war started and it left me wondering — how is it that a couple of highly-educated people from the best colleges in the country can’t seem to put their egos aside and make the political experiment work?

But the experiment became a slugfest with accusations being hurled. But despite everything, I was willing to forget everything. Friends do fight a lot, don’t they? Then came the bad parts. First, Kejriwal himself telling his party MLAs to try and break Congress. Then came a certain gentleman named Ashutosh. He wrote a series of open letters against Yadav and Bhushan.

The illusion was broken. AAP was not a different party but had become one of the many parties in India. The defences being put up by AAP were what you would hear any other political party. It was said that Yadav and Bhushan would be kicked out if it was “any other party”. But AAP had set out not just to give good governance, but also to do things differently and not do what other political parties do. If we wanted only good governance, Manmohan Singh wasn’t that bad a choice, neither is Narendra Modi or Manohar Parrikar. No matter how well AAP governs Delhi, the fact is that now it is and will remain just another party.