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Pipe Dreams
Delhi: In the troubled days following the J-crisis in the capital, senior members
of the "Cong parivar" -- Manmohan Singh, Pranab Mukherjee, M.L. Fotedar and R.D.
Pradhan -- were on regular attendance at Congress President Sonia Gandhi's residence. The
daily ritual went something like this: early afternoon, a call from Sonia's secretary, V.
George, would summon them to 10 Janpath. On reaching there they'd be huddled in George's
office, waiting for the call to enter the sanctum sanctorum. That wait could be as short
as 10 minutes or as long as eight to 10 hours. Beyond midnight, as it happened on a couple
of occasions. Their favourite pastime, while reclining on the ante room sofa, was to work
out the political arithmetics that could cut the longevity of the Vajpayee Government. It
cannot be an intellectually stimulating exercise, even for a party of greying Congressmen.
But at least one of them is putting time thus spent to good use: Mukherjee hides his
pipe-chewing face behind an exercise book on which he makes jottings, in Bengali, for his
forthcoming political memoirs. Famous
Bookworms
Calcutta: A recent inventory carried out by
the Jadavpur University library threw up some alarming facts -- and some famous names.
More than 25,000 rare books (many of them irreplaceable) have gone missing from the
library. Apparently, distinguished academics like Amartya Sen, Jashodhara Bagchi, Pabitra
Sarkar and Dilip Kumar Sinha have borrowed the books and "forgotten" to return
them. For instance, the record shows that Sen had borrowed the title Programmes of
Industrial Development in 1957, but speaking from Harvard he told a local newspaper that
he "does not remember" borrowing any book. Usually, it's the students who are
the scourge of university librarians, but at Jadavpur 900 faculty members (over the past
40 years) have collectively been responsible for 80 per cent of the missing books. All
that the students hope is that their professors have at least read them.
Desperate Knock
Calcutta:
Poor Renuka Chowdhury -- victim of the political recession. Practically out of a job with
her present employers, N. Chandrababu Naidu's TDP, she's now looking eastwards. She has
approached Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee with a proposal to set up the
Trinamool shop in Andhra Pradesh. She's even promised to rope NTR's son Harikrishna into
the Trinamool franchise. Now she waits while Mamata weighs the pros and cons of having
Renuka in her ranks. But time is running out: the Andhra Pradesh assembly elections are
due in November. Trinamool spokesmen sounded "positive" on Chowdhury's forced
application. The only hitch is that Mamata and Naidu are good friends.
Poetic Challenge
Chandigarh: It was an unusual setting
for Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to show his fighting spirits. At the formal
inauguration on April 8 of the Khalsa tercentenary celebration at Anandpur Sahib, an
upbeat Vajpayee vowed to fight the political battle thrust on him by AIADMK supremo J.
Jayalalitha. The master orator recited Guru Gobind Singh's war poetry to subtly convey a
political message through a religious idiom. All this in the presence of senior
Congressmen Manmohan Singh and Sharad Pawar. But the message was not lost on Jayalalitha,
who promptly cancelled her plans to attend a women's conference -- as part of the Khalsa
fete -- at Anandpur Sahib on April 11. |
