Alphabet soup

Not just “mothers”, Ram Vilas Paswan also heaped praise on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for notebandi — only this time he got a few letters here and there. Invoking the subject of demonetisation, Paswan said, “It has been proved that nasbandi has been beneficial for people.” Paswan joined in the laughter when it was pointed out to him that he was talking of notebandi. Nasbandi is Hindi for vasectomy, and many had compared the effect of Modi government’s notebandi, or demonetisation, to that of the dreaded nasbandi drive of the Indira Gandhi regime during the Emergency years of 1975 to 1977.