Playing a solo hand

Plain Politics

 Many years ago, when Dr Murli Manohar Joshi first became minister for Human Resource Development, he found working under him, a number of new, wide-eyed, first-time ministers of state (for that matter Dr Joshi was a first-time minister himself). His team settled in but found quite rapidly, that because Dr Joshi was such a hands-on boss, they had little to do.

 One of the ministers found this somewhat irksome. He also found that his standing as a minister was reflected in little else other than having a lal batti gadi and jhanda. So he decided to assert himself. He asked his staff to ensure that two instead of one bottle of packaged water be given to his office every day.