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India’s top columnists budget time for this! 
WSN Network

Interesting how top editors and columnists in India choose their subjects at a time when issues as serious as the annual budgetary allocations are being decided and the entire country is expected to be glued to the TV to watch its fate unroll. At a time like this, top columnist editor Vir Sanghvi chose to devote his entire column to a hairy conundrum in Pakistan, drawing attention to how politicians in Pakistan are growing new hair, Prez Mush is dying his mane and Nawaz’s pate is showing some robust growth. 

Read Sanghvi’s cerebral exertions: “The Sharif who had welcomed AB Vajpayee to Lahore had a head like a billiard ball. So distinctive was his baldness that Pakistani papers claimed that Nawaz and his brother Shahbaz were affectionately called ‘Do Ganje’ by their friends in the Punjab. 

 “But this new Sharif had hair -quite a lot of it. Gone was the smooth billiard ball. Instead, there was a slightly unruly mop of black steel wool and in each interview,Nawaz would self-consciously brush it back with his hand. 

“The new improved and hairyNawaz Sharif got me thinking: could it happen here? (He meant India.) 

Indrajit Hazra, another top shot Hindustan Times columnist, however kept his column on the budget. But did he succeed?  

Instead, he stuck to his core competency: making frivolous observations. Oh! we are quoting only the columnist himself. Hazra’ s entire column was on how “Kamal Nath, seated next to the FM, looked uncomfortable” and was perhaps thinking about “last night’s dinner” while Sharad Pawar, as per him, “was more likely...(thinking) what his dream IPL (cricket) team would be.” 

“With a business colleague in the room, I felt awkward about changing channels. I would then be exposing the fact that mature, adult entertainment like the annual Budget speech wasn’t my thing,” Hazra wrote. So what is he capable of? We leave it to WSN readers to deduce from such cerebral exertions.

5 March 2008
 

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