Mumbai: The change of guard in Maharashtra will bring familiar faces and a distinct flavour back in the power corridors.
This is the tribe of good old Personal Assistants and Officers on Special Duty, the real face of Mantralaya, not to be confused with their jaded ministerial bosses.
These PAs – as they are known to all and sundry -- often chaperone the ministers through the bureaucratic maze, helping them grapple with the voluminous files and documents that form part of a Minister’s work day.
Predictably, seeing the writing on the wall, the erstwhile BJP and the Shiv Sena ministers have emptied their cabins; but their Personal Secretaries are camping outside – figuratively speaking – waiting to latch onto one minister or the other.
Especially on their radar are first-timers who are expected to be administrative greenhorns and cannot move around without crutches.
In the yesteryears, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party ministers knew their personal assistants as well as their spouses.
The PAs were repositories of secrets and not just gate-keepers of their masters. More important, they knew each person who mattered by face and were a walking storehouse of gossip and data.
They knew what to say to whom and while the visitor waited, twiddling his thumbs, they would roll out the ‘dipwala chaha’ -- a tray of cups with tea-bags and plates of assorted biscuits, which almost resembled the original Bourbon.
In the previous BJP dispensation headed by Devendra Fadnavis, this old reliable tribe with its engaging ways was replaced with a more secretive species which would play its cards close to their chests. With that, the bonhomie went out of the window.
As the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party legislators went into a huddle with the Shiv Sena, many a familiar old PA of yore surfaced.
With that the silly surreptitious look is gone; instead the heart-warming smiles are back on the faces of party workers and leaders, who had nearly stopped coming to the state’s highest seat of power.
“Finally, work will get done in Mantralaya,” one leader was overheard as saying as he stood chatting with one of his former PAs. Journalists, who have been covering Mantralaya for over two decades, are the happiest. They have got their news sources back.
In fact, speaking of exchanging notes and information, there was a time a journalist would know if he would get tea or not, depending on the gestures of the PA. If the latter waved his palm, then it was definitely a ‘nana’ chaha, (no tea).
