Minutes before the helicopter carrying Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy crashed, he phoned his wife to say he was flying over the Srisailam dam. In fact, the dam was not on the aerial route on to his destination, Chittoor. The CM is believed to have directed the pilot to make a detour so that he could catch a glimpse of the reservoir and find out the level the water had risen to because of the recent rains.

Humans grounded, cars fly

Taking a dig at the Congress’s austerity programme, a DMK minister in a public speech pointed out that for Rahul Gandhi’s three-day visit to Tamil Nadu, the SPG had flown down 12 bulletproof cars from Delhi in the cargo of an Air Force plane. Rahul’s busy programme meant visiting several towns in a chopper and for his road travel in each town he had to have the cars ready in advance. The minister wondered why the SPG could not have commandeered bulletproof vehicles from the state.

Silent coup

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s election as president of the Gujarat Cricket Association caught the outgoing GCA president and Congress leader Narhari Amin totally off guard. Amin was in control of the association for 16 years and had built up a corpus of some Rs 48 crore. The former deputy chief minister assumed that Modi, a former RSS pracharak, would not be interested in cricket. The RSS generally frowns upon all sports introduced by the British, preferring instead indigenous games like kabbadi and kho-kho.

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