The Prince is Dead, Long Live the Leader

Often when I am at loss of what to write about in politics, or more how to write it, I have an imaginary conversation with my old colleague, the late Rajni Kothari. As a political scientist, Rajni was acute. He was a remarkable listener. He could listen for hours, taking notes on the back of envelopes. Most of all, Rajni had a way of giving wonderful advice. He told me once, "Don't listen to the expert. The expert is the master of the predictable. Go out for a walk and gossip with a fresh face. Make that the beginning of your thinking. Remember, you have an advantage. You are not a political scientist."

Invited to write on Rahul, I followed Rajni's advice. Rahul summons the predictable and yet remains elusive. I saw a picture of him at the HT leadership summit, and he looked as if he had strayed in. The inevitable move is to contrast him with Modi, pitching his levitas against Modi's gravitas. Luckily, I bumped into an old friend, an artist, who gave me a new tack. I told her Rahul in a semiotic sense looked like a Pinocchio, whose nose had not grown. My friend laughed and said you are outdated. "Rahul," she insisted, looked like something out of Archie comics. He conveys, to twist Milan Kundera's memorable phrase, an unbearable light- headedness of being.