Pre-Truth — snappy, witty and significant snippets from the world of politics and government.
Mamata Banerjee’s white-and-blue fixation goes far beyond politics
Hotel managers and housekeeping staff face a peculiar challenge when West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee comes to stay. She is quite fussy about the colour in her room, it seems. So everything needs to be white (the colour she mostly wears), with a dash of blue (her party’s colour). Anything red is a no-no. This is probably the most predicable thing about her.
Lux lifestyle at bust IL&FS
Many colourful stories of corporate lifestyle excess are tumbling out of Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS), which recently went bust. Apparently, at the fancy headquarters the company built in Mumbai’s financial district, Bandra Kurla Complex, a pianist dutifully played for a full hour in the lobby every day. Until, of course, the music abruptly stopped — for the company as well as the pianist.
Also read: Misra gets the better of Mishra in PMO, with Amit Shah lurking around
The Amarkantak ‘jinx’
There is an infamous ‘Noida jinx’ in Uttar Pradesh — any Chief Minister who visits Noida loses the next election. Madhya Pradesh has a ‘jinx’ of its own — that any leader who flies over the Narmada to its source, Amarkantak, loses her/his post.
Congress chief minister Arjun Singh, and BJP chief ministers Sundar Lal Patwa and Uma Bharati have fallen to this jinx, as has former CM of neighbouring Rajasthan and Vice-President of India Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.
Politicians, therefore, avoid arriving directly in Amarkantak in a chopper. Shivraj Singh Chouhan, for example, would make his chopper land outside Amarkantak and travel by road the rest of the way. Prime Minister Narendra Modi followed suit when he visited Amarkantak in May last year — his chopper landed in a village a few kilometres away from the town.
However, with Chouhan having lost power by a whisker in the recent assembly polls, many in BJP’s Madhya Pradesh unit are murmuring that the ‘jinx’ may now have spread to anybody who visits the pilgrim town. Whether this will impact PM Modi in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls remains to be seen.