People talk of ‘clutching at straws’. Naveen Patnaik, for a change, has clutched at ‘Fani’, an ‘extremely severe cyclonic storm’ in the Bay of Bengal likely to hit the Odisha coast on the afternoon of May 3, in his desperate, scarcely veiled effort to keep his bete noire Bijoy Mohapatra away from the Odisha Assembly. In a move that has invited both amusement and derision back home, the Odisha Chief Minister met the Election Commission of India (ECI) in New Delhi on Tuesday ‘and urged it to postpone the election for the Patkura assembly constituency in view of the impending cyclone that is likely to affect Kendrapara district of which Patkura is a part’.