The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : ‘O’ makes it all

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Tuesday, Jun 16, 2009
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

‘O’ makes it all

Numerology bug seems to have bitten one more politician. Following the footsteps of the likes of Lalu and Jayalalithaa, who made a few changes like adding or taking away a letter in their names, Kolusu Parthasarathy too made a change this time when he contested the elections from Penamaluru constituency.

On the advice of a numerologist, he started spelling his name as Parthasarothy and filed his nomination papers and affidavit accordingly.

Well, rationalists may not agree, but it appears to have clicked.

How else could one explain the manner in which he not only won the election by a narrow margin of 170 votes but went on to become a Minister?

What ‘opportunity’ in store?

It was a humble request coming from a Minister. But it was loaded with enough sarcasm to make the people, for whom it was intended, blush with embarrassment.

At an informal interaction recently, Minister for Animal Husbandry K. Parthasarothy asked scribes to give him an ‘opportunity’ to defend himself before they send anything to print. While it is the duty of scribes to take the version of persons about whom they want to write anything, the Minister said that he was making a humble request to be given an ‘opportunity to defend’ himself, repeating the word ‘opportunity’ more than twice. Having been entrusted with the Cabinet post recently, Mr. Parthasarothy seemed to be bracing himself for the worst that is yet to come.

Performance matters

In any open competition, only performers survive and others perish. This holds good for almost all situations. At The Hindu Education Plus Career Counselling Workshop - 2009, a parent posed a question about a public interest litigation (PIL) pending against deemed universities in the State.

While replying to this, a resource person came out with an assessment based on the facts about such universities in Tamil Nadu. In that State, many deemed universities came up quite early and attracted students in large numbers from Andhra Pradesh. Now that deemed varsities are coming up one after the other in AP itself, their fate largely depends on how well they compete in terms of giving education with quality. The only judgment these universities will stand is stated to be the testimonials from students and nothing else, the resource person observed.

Problem of plenty

With the district bagging a lion’s share of ministerial portfolios, it has become a Herculean task for the officials to accommodate the Ministers and their entourage. The Inspection Bungalow remains the most preferred guest house for the senior and junior Ministers alike.

It has been witnessing hectic activity for the last two weeks with the Ministers holding review meetings with senior district officials. But the bungalow consists of only four rooms on the first floor and there are four rooms in the new annexe, making it difficult when it comes to accommodating all the ministers.

But thankfully, all the ministers have their residences in Guntur except Minister for Endowments, Stamps and Registrations Gade Venkata Reddy who resides at Bapatla. The others, Minister for Heavy Industries Kanna Lakshminarayana, Minister for Secondary Education D.M. Vara Prasada Rao and Minister for Technical Education M. Venkata Ramana Rao reside close by and come to the I.B only for review meetings, saving the blushes for the revenue officials.

(K. Srimali, G.V. Ramana Rao, G. Ravikiran in Vijayawada and P. Samuel Jonathan in Guntur)

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