Cool Breeze: Shot Gunfire

Leave it to Shatrughan Sinha to be anything but khamosh. When he is not attacking the current BJP leadership ostensibly for sidelining him during the Bihar polls, he is promoting his biography, which, interestingly, has a foreword from a Congressman and not one of his BJP colleagues. When asked why he chose Shashi Tharoor to do the honours, Shatrughan Sinha’s biographer Bharti Pradhan quipped that she thought it’d be interesting to get the “bad boy of the Congress writing on the bad boy of the BJP”. Oh dear, wonder how Tharoor would react to that. But speaking of bad boys, Shotgun simply couldn’t resist this naughty line as he said in a TV interview, “I am a one woman man, at a time.” And then after a significant pause accompanied by a sigh, added, “And now, all the time.” Well, at least this is one Shotgun that doesn’t bore.

The Right to Banter

NCP MP Supriya Sule was caught in media fire when a lighthearted comment she made at an informal interaction with young college students in Nashik about gossiping in Parliament was recorded out of context and released to the press. As self righteous outrage broke out in the media, Sule found support amongst her parliamentary colleagues, with Milind Deora, former South Mumbai MP, tweeting that Sule should be judged for her parliamentary track record and not for her “harmless quips”, while Jaya Jaitly underplayed the comments on TV. Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi, and Pawan Khera also tweeted in her defence. Nor did any senior leader from any other party come out to condemn her. Which makes one wonder, is she carrying on her father’s legacy of cross party goodwill, or was the media making too much of what was essentially light banter at a college event, where she says her intent was to tell the kids that just as they gossip in classrooms so do MPs when speaker after speaker makes repetitive speeches? The debate is still out on MPs’ right to banter, but Sule did have a point about MPs making repetitive speeches.