Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu is evidently a firm believer in the saying "Health is wealth". The fitness conscious Telugu Desam Party (TDP) president is putting party members through rigorous health checks. This, he believes, is vital for the future of the party. Soon doctors will recommend measures and prescribe medicines to tone up the health of the 5,000 members of the party's general body. Naidu will apparently consider the health profile while choosing candidates for various slots both in the party and the government. That's certainly an incentive for party workers to shape up.

Of course, it helps that NTR Bhavan, the party headquarters in Hyderabad, is situated in front of the sprawling Kasu Brahmananda Reddy Park, which has extensive walking tracks. Though Naidu initiated ministers and legislators into yoga, meditation and other exercises within weeks after the last assembly elections, only a few of them could keep up with their quick stepping boss. But Naidu is not one to give up easily when it comes to training-be it of the body or the mind. Besides exhorting TDP members to be fit, he has urged them to hone their organisational and managerial skills and use the latest gizmos. The last instruction has met with mixed results-some ministers carry palmtops on which they note down appointments that they do not keep. But TDP General Secretary Lal Jan Basha believes, "All this is beneficial in having a youthful and alert party."

Naidu has let no grass grow under his sports shoes before announcing his next pet project-providing all active TDP members with insurance cover. "Happiness lies in good health and not in material wealth," he declares, pointing out that the rich live in fear of losing what they have amassed, thus ruining their health. From Laptop Guru to Telugu Robin Hood?

-Amarnath K. Menon

The Golden Pumpkin

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if the Cowboy won't get you, the Mullah's dream must. Mullah Omar, the world's most reported about one-eyed military leader since Horatio Nelson, has apparently abandoned all plans of surrender because of a "prophetic dream". Deep in sleep in his palace (cave?) in Kandahar, the southern Afghanistan city where the Taliban is mounting its last stand, Omar saw a happy vision "in which I am in charge for as long as I live". The world came to know of the revelation courtesy Ahmed Karzai, whose brother Hamid is a leading anti-Taliban Pashtoon leader holding talks with the current occupiers of Kandahar.

While Sigmund Freud in the heavens may have other interpretations of Omar's dream, more down to earth analysts see the Mullah's "divine message" as a convenient stalling mechanism. It gives the Taliban and its cohorts enough time to escape from Kandahar to Pakistan and live to fight another way, another day.

Mullah Omar-described as Osama bin Laden's father-in-law or son-in-law or both-has other publicised dreams, notably the formation of a united Islamic emirate stretching from Europe to Asia with Africa and, for all it matters, Antarctica thrown in. His worst known nightmare is compulsory college education for women.

SIGNPOSTS

AWARDED: The Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development for 2000, to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, for opposing racism and highlighting cultural diversity.

DIED: M.V. Chandrashekhara Murthy, Congress MP from Kanakapura in Karnataka, after a battle with cancer. He was 61. Murthy was union minister of state for finance in the P.V. Narasimha Rao government.

MENTIONED: In the Guinness Book of Records, 68-year-old Delhi Assembly Speaker Prem Singh, for winning elections from the same assembly seat without a break in the past 43 years.