The secret diary of P. Chidambaram

Hah ! There hasn’t been a squeak out of Narendra  Modi since I  put him in his place firmly  by vetoeing  his brand of  school boy debates. That he is still roaring like a Gir Lion let loose is another matter !! However,we, in the UPA , believe in ratty politics and so  do not talk about lions. But give us rats and we can talk ad nauseum about them. Talking of rodents  reminds  me to give myself a pat on the back for distancing myself so neatly from  the UPA  (  This is something I have learnt from Madam. When the party has to be criticized  hop onto the Sarkar ka   bandwagon. When  the government has to be pulled up , hop back to the party side  ).

I took the budget speech as an opportunity to  vindicate  my  stand, my ideology (  of course I do have one !) and  my performance. Well, I had to be clever, you know –subtle- and so I also   painted  a rosy picture of the UPA’s performance over 10 years, but the thrust  of the speech  was about  my monumental  role in rescuing the economy over the last 18 months. But, dear diary, the speech resulted in   a peculiar problem- some  Mr clever   spotted the fact that I  love the ‘I’ word . One  writer   even did   a scan of my budget speech and discovered that  I had  used   the  “I” word  92 times in my  budget speech . That is one “I” every 71 words. The nosey parkar carried on to say that “ the tone of tenor of Chidambaram’s speech also conveyed the same “I-ness”.  How do I  explain , without opening a can of worms , that if I had not been there , in the thick and thin of  my Government’s state of stagnant motion, things would have been worse ?  Yes, I  of  the impeccable credentials -  Harvard educated, Tam Brahm , sneer perched elegantly on my nose, accent ,attitude and lungi   firmly in place .

Accent reminds me of that poor sod, the one in the Government , the one whose accent I could not place. It wasn’t Harvard, of course, nor Cambridge,  Eton , or Yale. I was trying to figure out if it was a Bengali , Bihari or Haryanvi accent and in the process of figuring out my sneer became more pronounced and the local born and bred went to town about it. To put it more succinctly, he kind of ratted on me .

With elections looming in the near horizon, I have been getting all sorts of strange offers of re employment. But the strangest one was from someone called Rohit Shetty. Apparently he has  made some  movie called the ‘Chennai Express’ . Since I do not watch hindi movies I had no idea what it was all about. That is , until he told me the movie starred Deepika Padukone. I sat up straight and  offered  him my left  ear . Gokka Makka ( my goodness) !  Shetty  has offered me an item number- with Dipsy.

 It is going to be called ‘ Lungi Dance II’.