Members of parliament are up for sale. Yawn.

You can decry India's politicians on a thousand counts, but you certainly cannot fault them when it comes to meeting expectations. Without exception, they succeed in falling to lower depths in moronic nautankis that we depend on them to provide.

Take yesterday's no-confidence motion for instance. There was, as usual, shouting of slogans and stamping of desks. You could find familiar unruly hooligans swamping the floor of the house, whooping as they did so. Then there were the wads of money thrown up along with a myriad accusations. And finally, in a familiar flourish, there was the promise of an all-revealing CD thanks to a TV channel's sting operation.

Okay, so members of our parliament were bribed to sell their vote. Yawn. What's new???

Ah! Apparently they did not accept the bribe!! Instead, they threw up currency notes in the parliament so that CBI could seize them and investigate!!!

Yeah, right!!!!

Honestly, after years of Ekta Kapoor on TV and Politics 101 in the newspapers - who's going to buy that flimsy bullshit?? As you and I and all Indians can guess... no, not guess - we KNOW - the MPs who felt insulted at being presumed for sale were probably never approached for a bribe at all and made the whole thing up. (Had they really been offered a bribe, they would have accepted gracefully.) OR, they were bribed and then a contesting buyer for their vote bribed them even higher to spill the beans.

All this very exciting indeed, but am afraid that such conspiracies are repeated so regularly that, frankly, the episode hardly deserves attention even in a blogpost.

So let's turn our attention to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh instead, the man who survived and said the only thing I find amusing in the whole fiasco:

The Leader of Opposition, Shri L.K. Advani has chosen to use all manner of abusive objectives to describe my performance. He has described me as the weakest Prime Minister, a nikamma PM, and of having devalued the office of PM. To fulfill his ambitions, he has made at least three attempts to topple our government. But on each occasion his astrologers have misled him. This pattern, I am sure, will be repeated today. At his ripe old age, I do not expect Shri Advani to change his thinking. But for his sake and India’s sake, I urge him at least to change his astrologers so that he gets more accurate predictions of things to come.

[Full speech here]

LOL. Manmohan Singh may not have learned the ropes of power under the shadow of Sonia Gandhi. But he has certainly picked up the politician's flair of a good speech in his struggle against the Bharatiya Janata Party