Apart from losing his post as a BJP secretary and political secretary to party president L K Advani, there is another significant indicator that Sudheendra Kulkarni is in the doghouse. He is moving out of the room he occupies at 11 Ashoka Road and is also relinquishing the cubby hole adjacent to the BJP president’s office at the party headquarters. Kulkarni says he is shifting out voluntarily, but murmurs that his ‘‘bori bistara’’ (bag and baggage) should be thrown out have been expressed frequently in the party office ever since Advani’s Karachi visit. Mumbai film director Ram Gopal Verma has tread cautiously while making comparisons between his hero Subhash Nagre and Bal Thackeray in the movie Sarkar. Gopal’s hero, played by Amitabh Bachchan, is a benign godfather who is definitely a good guy and flouts the law only to help out people when they cannot get justice from any other quarter. The film characters resembling Smita Thackeray and Thackeray’s estranged son are also sympathetically depicted. Verma has to live in Mumbai and he doesn’t want to tangle with the Shiv Sena, having seen that directors of movies like Padmashri Laloo Prasad Yadav and Jo Bole So Nihal get into hot water by antagonising politicitised groups. But Shaad Ali Sehgal, the young director of Bunty aur Babli, has no such qualms. He has gone out of the way to take a dig or two at Mayawati in his film. He has a Mayawati-look-alike who wears starched kurtas and sports diamond earrings playing the part of the UP tourism minister. There is even a line of the dialogue which alludes very clearly to the Taj corridor scandal. The director was perhaps emboldened to take on Mayawati since he is backed solidly by UP’s ruling party. After all, Amitabh and Abhishek who star in the film, are known Samajwadi Party favourites. Ali has some pretty powerful political connections of his own. His father Muzaffar Ali has contested on the SP ticket and his mother, Subhashini Ali, is a former MP and a member of the CPI(M). Fortunately for Ali, Mayawati apparently doesn’t really watch many films. Farewell gift Financial Commissioner, Railways, Vijyayalakshmi Viswanathan, is on a long tour abroad this month. Her tour itinerary calls for a stop in Paris for meetings with the HEC, INSEAD, UIC and SNCF. In London, she has a meeting lined up at the London School of Economics and London Business School. Next she is off to New York where she has an appointment with the Stern Business School. After which she flies to Boston to meet the Harvard Business School students. Vishwanathan returns to Delhi on July 11, but shortly afterwards departs for Bonn, Germany. The finance commissioner’s trips abroad are a farewell gift since she is to retire on October 30. The practice of touring the globe at the expense of the government just prior to leaving the service is so common place that in 1998 the then Cabinet Secretary had even issued instructions that lectures and tours should not be scheduled for the last year before a person’s retirement since the Government does not benefit from the wisdom picked up by the official in the course of his tour. But a committee of Secretaries and the Railway Minister cleared her tour nevertheless.
