Same difference

Of the two prominent blue-turbaned invitees at the President's At Home one was former prime minister Manmohan Singh, who sat in a VIP enclosure out of bounds for the media, and the other was Montek Singh Ahluwalia, former Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. With Narendra Modi declaring in his Independence Day speech that morning, the move to scrap the Planning Commission in its current form and replace it with another institution, journalists were curious about what the longest-serving deputy chief thought of the idea. The otherwise voluble Ahluwalia was brief in his response, "I am and always have been in favour of restructuring," he said, reminding journalists that Manmohan Singh in his last speech at the Commission had in fact called for a restructuring of the planning body.