Heard: Trinamool Congress tongues are wagging over two married MPs who were caught in a clinch in a Parliament room
Overheard: Congressmen say the new house allotted to senior RS member Ambika Soni doesn’t even have a proper kitchen.
Andhra Pradesh
The Door Faces...
Chief minister Chandrababu Naidu is fast realising that troubles, when they come, come in droves. First, his TDP colleague Revanth Reddy was ‘stung’ while offering money to a rival MLA. Then, Naidu himself found his voice playing out on TV screens. As if that (and the looming possibility of more trouble) wasn’t enough, Naidu’s wife, Bhuvaneshwari, who runs the profitable Heritage dairy brand owned by the family, has been injured, apparently after a minor mishap on the treadmill at home. The Naidu couple had recently moved out of their family bungalow to a rented house in Jubilee Hills after their son had a child. But after Bhuvaneshwari’s fall, ‘vaastu’ fears have quickly come to the fore, so much so that neighbours say Naidu has permanently closed one entrance to the house and opened a new one, hoping some much-needed luck may perchance walk right in.
West Bengal
Picture Wags
Everywhere he goes, women, young and old, swoon over Shashi Tharoor for selfies. But the suave, much-married Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram was stumped recently when a fellow MP from West Bengal sternly asked him not to smile at her in Parliament. The odd request followed a photograph of Tharoor beaming at her that went viral on social media and launched a thousand speculations. The lady, who herself has had a happy marriage, was shocked to find people leering at her. Eventually, the lady with two daughters of her own (in their 20s), was disturbed enough to tell the former minister of state for external affairs that while they were ‘friends’, she did not want their pictures to disturb her peace and set tongues wagging.
Kerala
The Guv Test
When it suits them, BJP men quote the retirement age of “75”, but its candidate for the byelections to the Aruvikkara assembly seat is a young and impressionable 85. O. Rajagopal, the saffron party’s most visible face in the state, has never won an election to the Lok Sabha or the assembly, although he was a junior minister for railways in the Vajpayee government. The BJP state unit wanted to field a younger candidate but it seems Amit Shah told the old warhorse that if he was keen to become a governor, he needed to win at least a “municipal election” first.
Rajasthan
Pension Plus
No, he doesn’t look disabled. And both hands of Col (rtd) Rajyavardhan Rathore seem to be fine, judging from his Twitter feeds. But is the patriotic minister of state for I&B receiving a ‘disability pension’ from the army, which is 40% over and above the normal pension? Sources explain that the medal-winning shooter, who was fielded by the government to give details on TV of the covert military operation in Myanmar, is not the first or the only army officer who has been claiming disability pension so that they are exempted from paying income tax. A large number of ex-officers apparently resort to the practice as the price for their service to the nation. Perhaps the ministry should think of putting the number and the names of the disabled on its website.
Contributed by Pritam Sengupta, Dola Mitra, Minu Ittyipe and Uttam Sengupta
