His cousin and fellow Mandaleer, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, is known to have been shameless enough to spend his summers in London at Indian taxpayers’ expense to receive treatment for his kidney problem. When I mentioned this in this column some years ago, he told me in his defence that the reason why he needed to spend the summer in London in a five-star hotel was because English water was cleaner.

He is without a sense of irony or he would have noticed that if Indian water was not good enough for his dialysis why should it be considered good enough for Indians to drink? And, that when he was prime minister what measures did he take to ensure clean water for every Indian and hospitals that ensured suitable standards of dialysis?

Luckily, V P Singh is in semi-retirement but Arjun Singh is still in a position of power and, as this column has pleaded before, it is time he was sacked and the Human Resources Development Ministry closed down. We need a Minister of Education, not this weird hybrid of a ministry that has brought nothing but trouble.

And, while we are talking of people being sacked, it is time that the BJP sacked their charioteer before he takes them any further down his ‘‘yatra’’ to nowhere. Except from his flatterers, all reports from the journey indicate that Shri L K Advani has addressed embarrassingly small crowds. Nobody is interested in his journey and even within his party there are those who admit privately that it is an exercise in futility.

... contd.