Snipes to snowstorms & Revanth’s Harvard degree
Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy appears to have had enough of taunts over his alleged lack of English proficiency and misgovernance by K.T. Rama Rao and other Bharat Rashtra Samiti leaders. He is now returning home from the United States with a certificate from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Revanth has completed a leadership programme at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, becoming “the first CM in Independent India to enrol for a programme in an Ivy League”, the CMO has announced. After attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, the CM stayed in the US this week, attending classes for the Harvard programme ‘Leadership for the 21st Century (Chaos, Conflict, and Courage)’ from 25-30 January.
He was scheduled to attend the programme last year. But due to a full calendar at the time, he failed to do so, a top bureaucrat has told ThePrint.
“Braving a raging snow storm, Fern, marked by snowfall in excess of two feet (24 inches) and temperatures below -20 degrees Celsius in the Boston area”, Revanth Reddy undertook classes, assignments, submitted “homework”, and executed group projects with fellow global participants. With case studies from across the world, the Harvard programme analyses periods and eras across history. Participating groups solve and present solutions in the classroom.
On Friday, Revanth Reddy received the programme course certification from Harvard. It is the “first for any current chief minister in office in Indian history”, the CMO has stated. Revanth, according to the CMO, was on the campus of Kennedy School in Massachusetts and part of a cohort of 62 students from over 20 countries spread across five continents.
When the CMO had first announced that Revanth Reddy would participate in the Harvard programme, it invited another round of taunts from BRS working president and former minister KTR. “He became the CM in a contract, under payment (seat) quota manner. The CM, who suffers from an identity crisis, now says he will go to Harvard. He scoffs at people who are suave in English; we don’t know what he will understand there. Anyway, we hope he comes back a well-mannered person and desists making distasteful remarks on political opponents,” KTR told media persons last week.
Even before the CM had embarked on his US tour, KTR had cautioned the Congress that everyone, including professors, had to clean their own toilets in the US, harking back to old episodes when Congress leaders had jeered at KTR for cleaning toilets and dishes himself while studying and working in the US.
The road not taken & Ajit Pawar’s last moments
Fate can be cruel in more ways than one. Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, who died Wednesday in a plane crash landing, was originally supposed to travel to Baramati by road. He was to leave the previous night after wrapping up meetings in the Mantralaya in Mumbai. The convoy was ready at 7-7.30 pm. His personal staff was on alert. But there was something that changed Pawar’s mind.
For one, the deputy CM was visibly tired that day, those close to him have said. It had been a long day, including a Maharashtra cabinet meeting, followed by a cabinet sub-committee on infrastructure meeting. He had also been hard at work as a politician over the past few days, campaigning feverishly—first, for the municipal corporation polls, and then, for the Zilla Parishad and Panchayat Samiti elections.
On the day before he died, he interacted with MLAs, reporters, and party workers, and just a little before he was supposed to leave, he received a call from Praful Patel about files from Vidarbha that had to be cleared. Pawar decided to look into the files immediately. These were the sequence of events that made Pawar change his mind about travelling that night.
Another twist of fate was that Learjet, the company that provided the flight that crash-landed, had served the Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party efficiently throughout the 2024 assembly polls. When Ajit Pawar’s NCP scored a solid 41 seats in that election—compared to the Sharad Pawar-led NCP’s 10—Learjet was among the many entities Ajit Pawar had thanked. The deputy CM took his last flight belonging to a firm he trusted.
Thackeray cousins leap, from rivalry to remedies
After sharing the dias on multiple occasions—personal and professional—the bitterness among the Thackeray cousins, Raj and Uddhav, seems to be wearing off. Despite the controversial decision of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena’s local unit in Kalyan-Dombivali to join hands with Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena and upsetting Uddhav Thackeray in the process, the personal bond between the cousins is still going strong.
On the occasion of Bal Thackeray’s birth anniversary, Raj Thackeray has revealed that the brothers are now sharing the same doctor.
Uddhav Thackeray had been under the weather during the campaign for the Maharashtra local body polls, with a cold and a cough. At the Bal Thackeray memorial, Raj said he had contacted his family doctor, who prescribed medicines for Uddhav. With the medicines his cousin got him, the Shiv Sena (UBT) chief recovered within two days.
Raj is now going through a cold spell. “After the campaign, I became sick with the same cold and cough. It has been over six days. I have been taking the medicines my doctor has given me. But I’m not getting an inch better. Looks like my doctor has changed his party now,” the MNS chief joked on 23 January.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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