New Delhi
17 July 2006
Walk into a government department or a senior bureaucrat's office
and chances are you will come across the smiling visage of Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh hanging from the wall.
Officials are not sure how much human and financial capital has gone into removing the
earlier pictures of a sombre-looking Dr Singh looking straight out of the frame. Those
who do know, will not tell. Others will go only so far as to say that for someone who
instructed officials to dispense with the practice of adorning governmment offices and
government advertisements with pictures of the prime minister soon after assuming
office two years ago, Dr Manmohan Singh seems to have realised that appearances
count.
Whatever be the rationale or the motivation for seeking an image makeover, nobody's
complaining yet that the former professor of economics has dumped his austere ways.
However, like Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Mona Lisa, what intrigues many is the
mystery behind his new-found smile.
The new picture-frames were put up a few months ago apparently to coincide with the
completion of two years of the UPA Government in power. Ironically, the second
anniversary of the UPA Government itself was a lacklustre affair, overshadowed as it
was by the quota row, the resignations by two members of the Knowledge Commission
set up by the Prime Minister himself and the stock-market crash.
Sources said that soon after assuming office, Dr Singh instructed government offices to
dispense with the usual practice of putting up pictures of the prime minister on
government advertisements. A slew of media reports in the months immediately after he
assumed office had hinted how Dr Singh avoided the official photographer, whose job it
is to shoot the portrait of the new prime minister, and wriggled out of the appointment.
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