On a mission to decode the mystery called Rahul Gandhi

By the time you read this, you’d probably know Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi’s speech by heart. You would have seen him clutching the CII honcho’s hand to show how the Chinese exert pressure, you would have seen him stumbling over his notes to organise his thoughts and you would have read headlines and captions and pages and more pages dedicated to the big message (or the lack of it) in his speech.

But for a reporter who’s followed him from Bhubaneswar to Bundelkhand, I didn’t care if there wasn’t such a big message in his words to the industry; I was just looking for the little details.

When somebody is as inaccessible as Rahul Gandhi, even more inaccessible than the Prime Minister, your search becomes a little desperate as a reporter and you sink low to extract even the most mundane morsel of trivia.

So just like the way I had spent one Sunday afternoon lunchtime at Swagath restaurant in Delhi, endangering myself to a neck sprain trying to see who was the bald guy he was having a meal with and whether I could catch anything that they said, I set out on Thursday morning with my radar set on grabbing anything that would help me profile him. I presume most people in the audience there were on the same boat. I thought about what Azim Premji had told my channel during the World Economic Summit in Davos: “We don’t know him well enough.’’

And, of course, what would really, really help in knowing him was not just some general ideas about how he thinks our textbooks are dated and how he was asked about dropping mail from planes when he wanted to get a flying license in India, but what he actually says in the Standing Committee of HRD of which he’s been a member. From all accounts, he hasn’t said much there and neither does he say anything else in parliament. So, in the absence of that, here we are, trying to deconstruct Rahul Gandhi from what he says at a rare CII meeting.

I thought it was interesting that while he talked about new ideas of education, he still hung on to the Gandhi family’s trusted advisors. While Sam Pitroda figured prominently in his speech, another one of his father’s family friends, Suman Dubey, continues to be a major influence. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Suman Dubey’s son, Amitabh, an analyst, who had created quite a furore a couple of years ago by writing in the Economic Times how Rahul Gandhi should play a larger role, was hanging around CII too.

But it took author and my friend Rasheed Kidwai, to point out another seemingly irrelevant detail that Rahul gave away in his speech. While speaking of Brand India abroad, Rahul talked about what he saw in a nightclub in Spain — how India’s Big B was flashing on a big screen even in an ultra hip setting like a nightclub.

‘‘This gives glimpses of his wild youth,’’ said Rasheed, ‘‘and contrasts with traditional Indian politicos’ inhibitions.’’ The inhibition, I guess, which makes them wary of having a drink in public.

The inhibition which makes them keep under wraps the fact that Rahul Gandhi does frequent certain nightspots and that there is the occasional revelry or a party with the likes of Bollywood’s bad boy, Salman Khan. Rasheed pointed out how while Rajiv’s love for designer shoes and accessories and holidays in Ranthambore and Lakshwadeep were declared too indulgent for a Prime Minister in the 1980s, Rahul’s Spanish story didn’t raise any eyebrows. Or maybe, everyone was too distracted by his ‘beehive’ analogy.

The author is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News