​Mind your manners, not to speak of manors

An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but the savvy neta should settle for a more humble abode to call home, suite home.

That’s what a senior partyman told a Maharashtra state cabinet-hopeful, who was advised to rethink buying a luxury apartment in an upscale locale so as not to spoil his ‘image’ as a paladin of the have-nots. For those with political ambitions, home is not necessarily where the hearth, or heart, is but where the ballot box is. However, while there is a distinction between a residential home and a House founded, and funded, by the electorate, the lexicon of politics is replete with idioms borrowed from matters domiciliary.

Kitchen cabinets, for instance, have long been a fixture of successive legislative establishments, presumably on the assumption that too many cooks spoil the broth. In domestic matters, connubial bliss is often based on marriages of convenience.

In House-hold arrangements of another sort, coalitional compulsions make for strange bedfellows who pledge to have and to hold, to honour and to cherish, till defection do them part. But while untying the connubial knot involves protracted legal proceedings, no such delay need attend the split-up of coalitions. Bihar’s so-called mahagathbandhan was undone in a trice, with one of its constituents coming in home and dry and the rest left in the dog House.