•Suman K. Jha: You are a member of all the important Congress committees. As the CM of Karnataka, you streamlined the admission process to engineering colleges. You are a lawyer, a poet. How do you manage all this?

I work for 18 hours a day. I learnt it from my mother. She would wake me up at five and not let me stay up after 12:30 a.m.. When I became CM, I continued with that habit. A poet produces just one mahakavya but because of this habit, I produce two poems. I have to read or write every morning, it is like my recharge fuel. If some day, I lose my temper, it is because I haven’t read that morning. I have the ability to attach and detach myself from events. One day, while I was working at LIC in the personnel department, I suddenly realised that I was working alone in the office. Later, I found out that an alarm had gone off when a man committed suicide by jumping off the fourth floor of the building. I had been so absorbed in my work that I did not even realise that something had happened.

•Dhiraj Nayyar: What is the reason behind the decline of the Congress and the rise of the BJP in Karnataka?

I do not attribute Congress’s decline to the Third Front or BJP. In fact, the BJP is not that well rooted in Karnataka even today. If we made a concerted effort with effective management, we could have even won the last assembly elections—the percentage of votes for the Congress was more than the BJP’s. We failed somewhere in the management.

... contd.