At home in the world

You can take Pranab Mukherjee out of Bengal, but you can’t take Bengal out of him. After his joint press conference with the Pakistan Foreign Minister in Islamabad last week, Mukherjee was given faxes of the first indicative results of West Bengal’s panchayat election results. So, even as scribes waited for him to brief them on the Indo-Pak talks, Mukherjee was busy analysing the poll results. And when he realised that the leads showed the Left was not doing well in Nandigram and Singur, Pakistan was no longer the topic of discussion. The journalists ended up discussing the panchayat polls instead.