Deep Throat

New Delhi
Best Friends Forever

After leaving several IAS officers disgruntled, Smriti Irani seems to have finally found a confidante in the bureaucracy. In her first year as HRD minister, at least seven IAS officers and her then PS had walked out amid rumours of her temper tantrums. The second PS lasted a tad longer, but decided to opt out. The person who seems to have survived the minister’s mood swings is Imkongla Jamir, a 2002 batch IAS officer of the Karnataka cadre. The two ladies seemed to have hit it off so well that Irani had her transferred to the textile ministry.

New Delhi
The Acting Secretary

Officials in the PMO are ducking for cover after an Income Tax raid revealed that a purported RSS member has been impersonating as a personal secretary to the PM. A cryptic SMS from the man citing Nagpur is all it took for top government officials to bend backwards. The imposter thus managed to get transfers and posting of government officials or dodgy business transactions done. What nailed the imposter finally was a tax raid on an erstwhile Delhi wheeler-dealer.

Uttar Pradesh
Trouble ‘Uncle’

The ongoing cold war in Uttar Pradesh’s ruling Yadav clan has worsened with the return of Amar Singh. Using his clout with Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav and his younger brother Shivpal Yadav, he is now nibbling his way into matters of governance. As it is, Akhilesh Yadav had moved heaven and earth to keep the wily Amar Singh out. Now the youthful chief minister has to bear with increasing interference from Amar Singh, who has managed to have a finger in every pie.

Heard A minister called a journalist close to Modi in the hope of ‘access’, but cut the call when told the latter hadn’t met Modi since he became PM

Overheard In her second term as chief minister, Mamata Banerjee has only four persons on speed dial—all government servants

And Also

• Celebrated
  Ziona, the head of the world’s largest family, with 162 members, has turned 72. The Mizoram resident is reputed to have 38 wives, 89 children and a large number of grandchildren.

• Increased
  The consumption of eggs in India is repor¬ted to have shot up 800 per cent between 1991 and 2013, making it one of the big winners of the economic liberalisation process.

• Completed
  Solar Impulse 2, the first sun-powered plane to encircle the globe without a drop of fuel, has completed 42,000 km across four continents, two oceans and three seas.

• Died
  S.H. Raza, the painter who celebrated the bindu in several paintings and spent much of his life in France, aged 94, in Delhi

• Stopped
  The manufacture of video cassette recorders, by one of the world’s last known makers of the 1980s rage, the Funai Corporation of Japan. The VCR was launched 45 years ago.

Contributed by Ushinor Majumdar, Meetu Jain, Sharat Pradhan, Dola Mitra and Mihir Srivastava