VOICES

"I believe that in General Musharraf we have a person with whom we can do business."

-Manmohan Singh, prime minister

"I only corrected distortions that occurred in the history textbooks prepared by the NCERT, and if that is saffronisation there is no harm in continuing it."

-Murli Manohar Joshi, former HRD minister

"Montek Ahluwalia is all wrong. He belongs to the World Bank."

-Jyoti Basu, CPI(M) leader

"It would be interesting to see Laloo Prasad Yadav's acting skills in the backdrop of his humorous performance as a politician at the national level."

-J. Jayalalithaa, Tamil Nadu chief minister, on Laloo's role in the
movie Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav

"I tell my disciples, the swami's hair is his antennae and the beard is the earthing. It is just a uniform."

-Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of the Art of Living movement

THE BUZZ OF THE WEEK

The bureaucracy is not enamoured of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The flurry of circulars from the PMO is cracking down on perks like foreign trips and demanding more accountability.

"We are not going to accept double and triple policies. There is inconsistency in the Government over the talks."
MAULANA ABBAS ANSARI Hurriyat leader

EPILOGUE: The road to the talks table appears to be a long one with both sides treading warily.

PICTURE SPEAK

FRIENDLY FOES: Naidu and Bharati

DELHI After a week of drama, the Uma Bharati-M. Venkaiah Naidu face off finally ended, but not before the BJP's internal bickering got a public airing. The two had had a tiff on the phone after which they refused to speak to each other.

Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha L.K. Advani had to step in to broker peace. His first attempt failed. At a tea party thrown at his residence on September 26 both Bharati and Naidu sat at separate tables and refused to talk to each other. The result was a game of musical chairs for other guests. Initially, Sudheendra Kulkarni and Shivraj Singh Chauhan sat at Bharati's table while Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh were at Naidu's. After a while Kulkarni and Chauhan switched tables.

In the end, an exasperated Advani told the duo to sort things out. The diktat worked. Bharati and Naidu had a one-on-one and decided to call a truce. All's well again-until the next big fight.

-By Priya Sahgal

DELHI You cannot please all the people all the time, especially if you are Urban Development Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. He has annoyed Social Justice Minister Meira Kumar-who had been clamouring to have the bungalow at 6 Krishna Menon Marg converted into a memorial to her father, the late Jagjivan Ram-by allotting her the same bungalow as her official residence.

Azad has also upset some of his parliamentary colleagues by getting them to vacate their official bungalows. Now he has issued notices to six others-Kashiram Rana, Vinod Khanna, Jual Oram, V.P. Goyal, Ramesh Bais and Rajshekar Murthy. Playing tough cop comes with the territory, says Azad.

-By Bhavdeep Kang

DIED: Arun Kolatkar, 72, well-known poet, of cancer, in Pune. Kolatkar established himself as a bilingual poet with two books, Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita (1976) in Marathi and Jejuri (1976) in English which won the Commonwealth Prize and became a cult book.

The reclusive writer, who refused to have a telephone in his flat in Mumbai, did not publish his English poems for long until his friends brought them out in Sarpa Satra and Kala Ghoda Poems this year. The latter were vignettes of the world before him as he sat at his table at the Wayside Inn in Kala Ghoda, sipping his tea and pondering on the idli-seller. A multifaceted personality, the old boy of the JJ School of Art was also an acclaimed commercial artist.

NOMINATED: Marathi film Shwas, directed by Sandeep Sawant, as India's entry for the Oscar Awards, in the Foreign Film category.

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