But this week he was caught on the wrong foot. At a function organised at press club, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, the guest of honour, noticed that this senior scribe was conspicuous by his absence in the front row. He arrived, fifteen minutes after the function had commenced and the Haryana Chief Minister, was not averse to pinpoint the virtues of punctuality, even while he was seated at the dais. But the journalist was up to the task,” I got late at Haryana Chief Minister’s press conference because I am coming from another function which was hosted by the future chief minister of Punjab. I might be late here, but considering that I have made the journey from future to present, I must be given some leeway.” Wonder, what Mr Sukhbir Badal has to say on this.

Privileged motion
There is one more entry in the already laong list of people who are exempted from paying toll tax on the sundry road check posts in Punjab. This category is that of Accredited journalists. Close to 700 scribes in the state, will escape the ‘agony’ of shelling out money when they travel on state’s roads by merely flashing their identity cards. Apparently thrilled at this new exemption, a journalist, came up with a peculiar metaphor for his new found privileged status.” This authorisation card is like a cross and the toll collectors are like Dracula, who would retreat at the mere sight of it”. Ahem, Bam Stoker would have been impressed.

Weight loss
The employees of the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (PGIMER) who are on strike, came up with a new yardstick to ‘measure’ their struggle. When their leader, Ashwini Munjal, started the hunger strike, his comrades started taking stock of his weight daily and the media was constantly updated over the ‘weight loss programme’. Text messages on cell phone would read “Mr Munjal has lost 2.5 kg weight today. He was weighing 82 kg on Feb 23 and is now around 79.5 kg”. Chances of being dubbed facetious apart, we will have to say, that this seems to be an efficient weight loss programme.

Computer convenience
The Municipal Corporation’s decision to teach the computer fundamentals to councillors is facing some strange problems. Many of the councillors are have not completed formal schooling, while some of them have never worked on a computer. In the two hour training programme which is conducted daily, our ‘pupils’ come up with some remarkable suggestions. One gem was, “ The letters on the keyboard should be in an alphabetical order. Here they are in a jumbled order. They should have thought about convenience of typists”.