But the one person who's finding it a trifle difficult to master this is Sharad Pawar. At public meetings he often raises his arm, palm facing the crowd and ooops! Memory jolts. This hand will not deal a winner. Hurriedly his fingers claw, tick, tock, tick... The thing with a party symbol like the clock is the inevitable references to time. In village after village, meeting after meeting, the cliches resound. If it's the NCP then the time is always right, or that the time has come; for the Opposition this time is always running out or, more definitely, it's up.

Only at theend of a hard day's campaigning, slumped on a sofa in an impersonal hotel suite, away from the bravado of electoral rhetoric, Pawar admits it's also a moment of reckoning. Not so much in a defeatist fashion as with a grim, chin-up determination.

Twenty years separate the two revolts of Sharadrao Pawar against the two Gandhi women. In '78-'79 he had walked out of the Congress to lead the Progressive Democratic Front and become the youngest Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Barely three months ago he dissented once again and formed the NCP. But at 57 when you are looking to peak a political career more with hope than strength, revolt is no longer the turn-on that it was at 37. ``Really, we never imagined that we would get expelled from Congress,'' he says.

So in the face of the inevitable, the Maratha strongman does what he knows best: dons his stark white linen trousers and shirt, slathers layers of translucent `fragrance-free suncare lotion' and buzzes around the state in his metallic blue chopper, wooingthe electorate. He sets himself a punishing pace. In the past 15 days he has been addressing 10 meetings a day, averaging 300-400 km daily as he criss-crosses Marathwada, Vidarbha, Konkan coast and the sugar belt.

Chasing him around the countryside a pattern emerges: across Parner, Rahuri, Yeola, Shrirampur, Kopargaon, and sundry other kasbahs, Pawar arrives in his chopper, which inspite of the now almost yearly sightings, still excites the villagers. At the venue the Lok Sabha and Assembly candidates who address him as the ``future prime minister'' are allocated five minutes apiece while Pawar gets 10.

In flat, conversational monotone he talks about Kargil (specifically intelligence failure on the intruders), about Sonia and how the Congress party is so desperate for a leader, about coalitions and their inevitability. But his speeches are dominated by issues concerning the shetkaris (farmers).

His utterances on the Sena-BJP government's failure to keep prices of onions under control or to stem farmers'suicide are greeted with heartfelt nods and taalis. After a final exhortation to vote for the ghadi, he's off. By the time the dust raised by his chopper settles, the modest crowd is on its way home talking approvingly of Pawarsaab.

So where's the charisma?

``But he's one of us,'' argues the sarpanch of Parner village. ``He understands issues of agricultural prices, dealings of cooperative banks, the politics of shetkari sangathanas, the vagaries of the monsoon. Bal Thackeray knows only Mumbai.'' And Sonia Gandhi? ``Oh we can't even go near her,'' says Nirmala Malpani, the district NCP chief at Shrirampur who was earlier with the Congress. ``I was not even allowed to present a memento to her when she addressed the Indian National Trade Union Congress meeting at Shrirampur in January, despite having been a Congress worker for decades. Now Pawarsaab, he even knows the names of my children.''

So there's the dilemma of one of India's few career politicians. He's worked all his life to build his base inMaharashtra. He knows the issues, the ethos, the language. But now that his ambitions reach beyond the state, his appeal doesn't. Perhaps he understands this and which is why his goal in this elections is ``modest''. He says the NCP and the allies will form the government in Maharashtra.

Beyond that, at the national level, the backroom boys of coalition politics have created this rarefied realm of The Possible. ``If Deve Gowda with 17 MPs can become the Prime Minister then surely others can hope,'' he says. ``If not...'' he suppresses a yawn of utter exhaustion. As in life so in politics, tomorrow is another day.