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Kobad Gandhy’s arrest has generated reams and reams of newsprint in Mumbai. Every report has unfailingly mentioned how this scion of a wealthy family gave it all up for the sake of the poor; how he and his wife Anuradha, who also hailed from a middle-class family, lived with the poorest of the poor in the deep jungles, and how she finally succumbed to cerebral malaria while he today suffers from various ailments.

Why does Gandhy’s story generate so much interest? Why are so many of us so keen to know more about this man who’s family ran an ice-cream business (according to one report, his family introduced fresh strawberry ice-cream to Mumbai and India) and lived on Worli Sea-face, still one of Mumbai’s most posh localities?

The expulsion of Jaswant Singh from the BJP raises some serious questions that need to be addressed. The first is the expulsion itself. For a party that should be gathering its flock after its defeat in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP appears to be in a self-destructive mode. It is fighting a bruising battle from within and there is every reason to believe that the BJP may end up as another small party with pockets of influences, not very different from what the Communist Party of India (Marxists) is today.

When senior leaders sought a discussion on the party's debacle, they were silenced. Then the party asked Vasundhara Raje to quit as leader of the opposition in the Rajasthan assembly, on the grounds that she had to take responsibility for the BJP's defeat in that state. That principle is fine, but should it not apply on the likes of LK Advani and Rajnath Singh, the men at the helm and who thus bear the maximum responsibility for the party's descent into irrelevance.

The brouhaha over former president APJ Abdul Kalam being frisked makes for interesting reading. Our politicians have gone into a lather over what they term the “mistreatment” meted out to Abdul Kalam. The charitable view is that our politicians were upset at the treatment meted out to India’s former Head of State, a man who had endeared himself with his simplicity, down-to-earth attitude, and his poverty-to-glory story. He is a person easily recognised on the streets today.

Kalam as president cared little for protocol, much of which was derived from the British rulers of yore. For instance, there is a staff member to help the president remove and put on his shoes. Abdul Kalam had stopped this practise, removing and wearing his shoes himself. And so, in a similar vein, when asked to empty his pockets before entering the aircraft, he did so with minimum fuss.

In 1971, India won a comprehensive victory against Pakistan. It as in this war that the Indian Navy vanquished the Pakistani Navy, bombing Karachi and preventing the retreating Pakistani troops from escaping by sea in Bangladesh, even as the Indian Army smashed the Pakistani forces while the Indian Air Force controlled the skies in just a couple of days. This victory has meant no major war ever since and a Navy to reckon with.

The man who led the navy in 1971 was Admiral SM Nanda, who expired on May 11.

In a few days time, Dr Manmohan Singh will demit office as prime minister. He might well be re-invited to form the next government and take the oath of office of prime minister once more. Singh might well view a second stint as prime minister as a chance to redeem himself and complete the tasks he set out to do in 2004. But the honest answer is that Singh would be doing himself and all of us a favour by not becoming the PM for another term.

Singh’s five years in office have not been memorable. Singh came into office as the darling of the middle-class, with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. His disdain for power and his relatively clean image had the media eating out of his hand. In that sense, when Sonia Gandhi picked him over so many others in the Congress party, it is now clear that she wasn’t making an intelligent choice; rather she had no choice but to choose Manmohan.