Remember the debate on the confidence motion in the Lok Sabha, where the BJP attempted to puncture the secular credentials of the Congress by recalling the anti-Sikh ads released by it after Indira Gandhi's assassination?Unfortunately, when the Congress challenged the treasury benches to produce the offending ads, they couldn't. Luckily for the BJP, the opposition's fumbling attempts to form an alternative government overtook the embarrassing matter.

Yet, a few days after the Vajpayee government fell, the issue was resuscitated by veteran journalist Pran Sabharwal, better known as the father of L. K. Advani's estranged daughter-in-law. Sabharwal breezed into Vajpayee's Parliament House office waving a copy of the elusive ad and ticking off the caretaker PM's backroom boys for not doing their job. But the allegedly offending ad neither mentioned the word `Sikh', nor presented Sikhs in a bad light, so Vajpayee's honchos couldn't be faulted. The BJP may be down, but it's definitelynot out.

A To Zee Of TV

Certain interesting true confessions came thick and fast from Zee TV Chairman Subhash Chandra at a lecture in the Capital. ``As a father I wouldn't allow my kids to watch a lot of stuff on Zee TV,'' he said, much to the alarm of certain ladies in the audience. The media mogul also insisted he had never worked against Direct-To-Home (DTH) TV and had ``been misread by my friends in the print media. In fact, DTH should have come two years ago, but with regulation.'' Chandra also had praise for the bureaucracy, unusual for any private entrepreneur in India, especially for one who's facing a FERA rap. ``Only our laws are very antiquated,'' he said. His panacea for all the ills is education for the masses -- everyone's quoting Amartya Sen these days. And why? ``Because we all get the government we deserve. We have a fractured mandate because the people are not educated.'' Wonder whom they'll vote for then.

Fingerprints Tell A Story

Joerdis Kunert isn't an artist ofrepute. Even to a layperson, she looks what she is: a student. To be precise, a second-year Fine Arts student from Berlin at Vadodara's M. S. University. But at a four-hour exhibition in this city of painters, Kunert presented a show Vadodara had never seen: a `live' exhibition at a construction site. At the show, between bricks, iron girders, cement and grime, the masons hung transparent plastic sheets with their enlarged fingerprints painted in acrylic colours. The 26-year-old's message: ``Everyone has fingerprints and if each fingerprint is different, so is the life of the person whose finger it is.''

Eternal Rebel

Many believed that after her mother's death, Taslima Nasreen would not return to Bangladesh, where she faces a fatwa. But they didn't know Taslima well enough. True, the rebel writer has not returned home since her mother's death. But she is nothing if not controversial, even when she's on foreign shores. All she had to do was write a poem in the memory of her mother, which hasoffended fundamentalists. The poem was published in a Bangla magazine from Calcutta. Dhaka wasn't pleased and banned the magazine. When Calcutta journos visited Dhaka on a goodwill trip, they were told the poem had dampened the Dhaka-Calcutta bus bonhomie.

TAILPIECE

Former Supreme Court judge and green crusader Kuldip Singh, speaking in Pune on politicians: ``Even calling them third-rate would be imparting them a certain class. They don't have any class at all.''

Don With A Following

Mafia don-turned-politician Arun Gawli seemed reluctant when he came down to stay at the bungalow of his in-laws at Wadgaon Paanchpir village after being externed from Mumbai and Thane. The situation has changed remarkably in two months. When he first came down, the only people he met belonged to the 100-strong entourage with him. No one else ventured to talk to him. But now, all that's history.

``He is friendly with every visitor and tries to help those in trouble,'' says the owner of a wayside eatery onthe road to Gawli's village. ``And moreover, his men patronise our shops, hotels and dhabas, bringing us good business. So why should we complain?'' Gawli certainly knows how to win friends and influence people.

-- HARPREET KAUR in Chandigarh; PRASANNAKUMAR KESKAR in Pune; SUNIL JAIN and KAVEREE BAMZAI in New Delhi; DARSHAN DESAI in Vadodara; ASHIS CHAKRABARTI in Calcutta