Opinion Ministers golf apart

GUJARAT Chief Minister Narendra Modi wants to get the state into the Guinness book of Records by outdoing Mexico’s feat of organising the largest number of chess games to be played simultaneously at a single site. In Mexico City,13,444 players took part in a giant chess tournament on October 21,2006. The Gujarat government plans to make arrangements for 20,000 people to play in a chess tournament at the Sardar Patel Stadium in Ahmedabad on December 24. Modi admits that though he is president of the Gujarat Cricket Association,his favourite game is chess.

Kolkata cleanup

SINCE the Trinamool Congress now controls the Kolkata municipality,Mamata Banerjee has asked Sam Pitroda for advice on how to clean up the city. Dinesh Trivedi,is the link between Pitroda,who advises Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on infrastructure even though he spends most of his time in the US,and Banerjee. The Minister of State for Health and Pitroda were both together as students in the US. Both are Gujaratis and Pitroda usually stays at Trivedi’s home whenever he comes to the Capital. Trivedi reserves a special room for Pitroda,with an interior similar to his bedroom in Chicago. Before the Congress’s broadside against five-star hotel accommodation,Pitroda used to stay at the Maurya Sheraton.

Fear of Big Brother

REPORTS that phones of communication Minister A Raja were tapped and his private conversations leaked to the media has alarmed many central ministers. Ministers from Raja’s home state of Tamil Nadu are especially concerned over phone tapping. One minister routinely borrows the mobile phones of visitors to his office to make confidential phone calls. For the same reason,several ministers meet political callers at Parliament’s Central Hall,even when the House is not in session,rather than at their offices. They presume that Big Brother is not listening in the hallowed confines of Parliament.

Slightly batty problem

NO satisfactory solution has been found for the monkey menace in many parts of Lutyens’ Delhi. Hiring langurs to frighten monkeys away merely acts as a temporary deterrent. For residents of Akbar Road and of neighbouring bungalows,with such high profile tenants as the Congress party,Sharad Pawar and the chiefs of the Navy and Air Force,there is an additional problem of bats. The bats hide in the trees by day but come out at night and disturb the peace. The ground is cluttered with their droppings. The authorities are flummoxed over how to get rid of the bats without cutting down the branches of the trees. The SPG is grappling with the problem of ridding 2 Motilal Nehru Marg,the office of the National Advisory Council (NAC),of bats. As chairperson of the NAC,Sonia Gandhi visits the building frequently.

Conspiracy conscious

AT a meeting of some 200 district electoral officers in Tamil Nadu,both Navin Chawla and S Y Quraishi were critical of the partisan behaviour of certain electoral officers during the parliamentary polls and assembly by-elections. An EC even remarked that Tamil Nadu is getting “notorious for its money power”. The commissioners were particularly concerned about the conduct of some promotee IAS officers and warned that they could be replaced by revenue cadre officers in the 2011 assembly poll. Details of the meeting were reported to Chief Minister M Karunanidhi. A paranoid DMK senses a conspiracy involving political rival Jayalalithaa.DMK members recall that Chawla had ensured the reclusive Jayalalithaa’s presence at the golden jubilee celebrations of the Election Commission and facilitated a meeting,however brief,between her and Sonia Gandhi.