Guess who's not coming to dinner: Leave poor Rahul alone

Bechara Rahul Gandhi. The world is so so cruel to him. There is absolutely no appreciation of the fact that the Congress yuvraj actually had to run a campaign, even fight for his own seat in the family pocket borough. He had to smile his way through a road show, pick up babies (who promptly started to bawl) and then horror of horrors, show up on election day and go from booth to booth like some common candidate. That’s like, well how should we put it, like a real election campaign or something. I can vouch for it. I was there in Amethi. As the marigold rose petals showered down on him on the streets of Jayas, I distinctly saw beads of sweat on his forehead in the afternoon sun. Rahul Gandhi sweated it out like an aam aadmi. Let no one say otherwise. [caption id=“attachment_1525309” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Rahul Gandhi. AFP[/caption] As an AAP coordinator put in Amethi, this time there was a real election instead of a selection. And that was surely hard on Rahul Gandhi. He even had to take over the Munshiganj guesthouse and stay overnight in Amethi instead of just flying in and out as he usually does said the owner of a tea shop on the highway to Amethi. Now to get so much flak for skipping a silly little Delhi dinner is just so petty. I mean he just did not show up. It’s not like he ripped the dinner invitation to shreds at the Delhi Press Club and called it “nonsense”. This is much ado about nothing. It’s just a dinner. It’s not like he’s been MIA where it really counts, eg in Parliament. OK, scratch that. According to India Today, Rahul has the fifth-worst report card among all Congress MPs with an attendance record of 13.64% in the standing committees where he is a member. But still were #RahulSkipsDinner tweets like these really warranted? rupa subramanya ‏@rupasubramanya Mystery solved. Rahul Gandhi looked at watch made in Mirzapur which gave him wrong time & date for the dinner. Suman Sharma ‏@SumanSharma Its not Kejriwal who’s the real ‘bhagoda’ but Rahul Gandhi who culdnt even wait till results, ran away fearing defeat !! Rishi Bagree ‏@rishibagree Is Rahul Gandhi on his way to becoming the Amelia Earhart of India? Rahul Roushan ‏@rahulroushan There was free food yet Rahul Gandhi skipped dinner. Sacrifice runs in the veins of this family. #Respect It’s not like this is so unprecedented. After the Uttar Pradesh election debacle in 2012, Rahul disappeared for a bit as well. All this surprise and self-righteous indignation is clearly posturing by a jealous media annoyed that they don’t get to go on their post-poll vacation yet. But they don’t realise that the Gandhis have sacrificed a lot for this nation unlike whiny media hacks. Surely, the least a Rahul is entitled to for all that generational sacrifice is taking two days off at the end of a six-week campaign. Did I mention “gruelling” campaign already? Obviously the media, with nothing better to do until results come out on Friday, are entertaining themselves with this small-minded game of Where in the World is Rahul. It makes a change from confusing exit poll numbers. And his opponents are adding their two bits making this a political issue. “Rahul Gandhi is a foreigner, he comes to India for a holiday. When he is done, he goes back to his foreign home,” says Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena, a party with a keen nose for foreigners. Anonymous sources are whispering that he’s gone abroad and will be back before counting on Friday. The Congress vice president needed a little me-time and R&R before he comes back to pick up the pieces of his party. Is that too much to ask for? Ajay Maken explained it quite clearly. “After three months of gruelling campaign, Rahulji is out of town for two days. He will be back tomorrow. Rahulji has already met the honourable Prime Minister on 10 May to personally thank him for services and contributions rendered to the nation.” Chalo. There you have it. Move along folks. Nothing more to see here. It has been a hard campaign. Helicoptering from rally to rally – three or four a day. Everyday for six months. Oh, sorry, that was Narendra Modi. But you get the picture. Now thanks to Rahul staying away his absence has overshadowed the actual dinner. The newspaper reports mostly do not even mention important facts like what was on the menu or the colour of Gursharan Kaur’s sari. Instead everyone is buzzing about how Rahul has somehow lost the one thing the Gandhis had in their blood — a sense of decorum and formal etiquette. That was one thing you could count on when it came to the blue-blooded First Family. Now even that is lost shuddered Lutyens Delhi already anticipating the horrors of an ab ki baar Modi sarkar because we all know that once dinner etiquette is lost, civilisation itself is doomed. Soon there will not be folded napkins anymore. And of course this was read as further proof of a clueless Congress unable to even manage basic PR. As Omar Abdullah tweeted “If you knew he was not attending the dinner and he had explained his absence to the PM earlier, put out the statement before the news breaks.” But perhaps the Congress should be thankful too about its MIA chief. Perhaps Rahul is saying once again, this time with his (missing) body language that this is a job he really really does not want. Perhaps this is an act of rebellion — not showing up for Mummy’s dinner party. Some food for thought, Congress leaders? Meanwhile the rest of you, give the poor guy a break. Once the media piled on him because he had dinner (with Dalits). Now it’s picking on him because he skipped a dinner. It’s enough to give a guy indigestion.