Random observations

Touch me not: A K Anthony’s report analysing the reasons behind the failure of the Congress in the UP elections have been submitted and stashed away. The Congress had projected the UP polls as the semi-final for Rahul’s ascension to power in 2014. With the Congress biting the dust, Rahul immediately owned up responsibility for the failure and called it a big ‘learning’ for himself. The only place where he did not campaign was in Manipur and the Congress won the elections there. But after two weeks, Rahul came out threatening to take all the non-performers of the UP polls to task. In the Congress, the Gandhi family is beyond blame. The fault always lies elsewhere.

A falling house: While the Congress in a deep cess pool, the members of the BJP, instead of fighting the opponents, are busy fighting amongst themselves. In Karnataka, BSY is threatening to explode every other day. In Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje is showing signs of a rebellion. In Gujarat, Narendra Modi seems to be cut off from what is happening to the party and is on a non-cooperative mode. Even with a mediocre performance, Gadkari is set for a second term as the party president. Except for some mark of brilliance at the local level, the central leadership is in stupor (who is the leader, by the way?). The Congress has every reason to lose the next election and yet, BJP does not seem to be in a position to assume power. Never before has its hands been so weak.

Red Handed: Five young IPL players were caught on the cameras of India TV a few days back and have been suspended from their teams on charges of spot fixing and match fixing. The careers of these players crashed even before it could take off. The boys must have been all too excited after having been approached with these offers and before they knew what it was, they were clean bowled. The real culprits of the game are nowhere in the picture. It is a known fact that the IPL is a big hogwash, with a free flow of black money. There is little transparency in the financial affairs.  And yet, people throng to the stadiums,  displaying a spirit which is difficult to understand. The Prince of Kolkata Saurav Ganguly  is playing for Pune and the Bangalore boy Rahul Dravid is the captain of Rajasthan. In times of shifting loyalties, all these arguments make no sense anyway.

 A Falling Star: Shahrukh Khan is back in news again for the wrong reasons. This time, he was found picking up a fight with the security guards and officials of the Wankhede stadium in a drunken state. He is said to have abused the personnel and the Mumbai Cricket Association is planning to ban him for life at the stadium. Over the last few months, Shahrukh has been in negative news. The other day, he ended up beating Shirish Kunder (Farah Khan’s husband) at a party, when the latter cracked a joke about the failure of Ra.one. Before that his proximity to Priyanka Chopra resulted in an attack on Chopra by Karan Johar. The Shahrukh of today is an epitome of a star traversing a downhill journey. His movies are failing to click and his public image is on the wane. The earlier he calls it a day, the better it will be for him and for his fans, who can retain the image of a star, whose stardom has not been lost yet.