Third Front blues
Never-say-die architects of the Third Front will be looking at the expelled Congress leaders with a mixture of hope and consternation.

Political footnotes
The slipper is on the other foot. Jayalalitha, long used to making other politicians look pathetic and ridiculous, has fallen victim to a barb carelessly launched by Laloo Prasad Yadav.

An animated abstraction
``I feel like I have been widowed again.'' Sonia Gandhi reportedly told a woman party colleague. In photogenically oriental India, widowhood is a woman's ultimate, and unsolicited, victimhood, in which the social is more defining than the personal.

  The psychology of giving
  She should be like Sonia, not Indira