ULFA's dissolution has cemented Himanta Biswa Sarma’s political standing

Cultivating connections: Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is enhancing his engagement with farmers by visiting farms. He has also announced ‘open office hours’ at Krishi Bhawan every Tuesday. As a long-serving chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, his personal touch had done wonders for the party in the state. The women called him ‘mama’ (uncle) or ‘bhaiya’ (brother). That experience may come handy in reaching out to farmers who have been unhappy with the Modi government. The weekly meetings aim to build rapport and address concerns, and Chouhan’s proactive approach could help ease tensions and strengthen the government’s relationship with the farming community. Perhaps, it may then be a time to coin another term of endearment for Chouhan. Any suggestions? | Illustrations by Jairaj T.G.

Not a walk in the park: Congress MP Adoor Prakash recently trespassed on a park named after the late freedom fighter and Congress leader Ponnara Sreedhar in Kerala’s capital. Accompanied by a group of Congress workers, Prakash set out to lay flowers at Sreedhar’s statue on the leader’s birth anniversary. To his surprise, the gate was locked, prompting the MP to climb over the metal fencing. Prakash later claimed that the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation—where Sreedhar once served as mayor—had shown apathy towards the park. In response, the corporation, ruled by the CPI(M), insisted that the gate was locked to keep out antisocial elements, adding that if only the MP had given them a heads-up, they would have kept the gate open!

Self-assured saffron: Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’s confidence knows no bounds. So sure he is of the BJP-led alliance’s victory in the upcoming assembly elections that he has agreed to attend an event slated for 2026. At a recent event to inaugurate a semiconductor project in Navi Mumbai, Fadnavis showered praise on the company’s founder. The founder in his speech said that 2026 would be a milestone year for his company and that there would be a bigger celebration then. Fadnavis responded, saying that he was blocking his diary for 2026 now itself. “Anyway, we will be in power again in 2026. So the three of us [Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, Fadnavis and Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar] will come back for the celebration.”

Ammu’s story: Remember the character Ammu in Arundhati Roy’s Booker-winning novel The God of Small Things? She was fiery, fearless and... fictional. They say she was modelled after Arundhati’s mother, Mary Roy. If so, Ammu’s moving from the world of make-believe to the less exciting one in which we all live. Arundhati is writing a book about her mother—Mother Mary Come To Me. “Perhaps a writer like me deserved a mother like her...,”she said. “Even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.”The book will be published by Penguin Random House in September 2025. She had earlier spoken about her relationship with her mother being fraught, but then, haven’t we all been there, faced that? Fraught mother-daughter relationships seem as much a law of the universe as gravity, viral cat videos, or potholes on Indian roads | Salil Bera

Monsters’ ball: When Guillermo del Toro won the Oscar for his film The Shape of Water (2017), we thought his obsession with strange, non-human creatures was over. But we thought wrong. From the humanoid amphibian of The Shape of Water, he’s moving to Frankenstein’s monster in the science fiction horror film, Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s eponymous novel. Del Toro says the film won’t be a direct adaptation of the novel, but rather “an adventure story that involves the creature”. But Shelley might perhaps pole-vault in her grave when she hears who has been roped in to play the role of the monster. Jacob Elordi, who resembles a monster as much as a Himalayan cave resembles Windsor Castle. Casting him as the monster seems a waste of good looks, but well, handsome is as handsome does, right? | Getty Images

AI vs AP: Will AI take over our lives? That’s a question for the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world, you would say. But what if the latest ‘bae’in B-town can talk about it from experience? Ananya Panday, on a high from the success of her OTT series debut Call Me Bae, will next be seen in Vikramaditya Motwane’s cyber thriller CTRL. In the Netflix film, which releases on October 4, Panday relinquishes control of her life to an AI assistant after a bad breakup—she asks it to ‘delete’ her ex and he goes missing. Talk about things getting too real! | PTI

Mars Wars: It seems Elon Musk will go to the ends of the earth to... well, get out of earth. While Kamala Harris harps on about immigration, abortion and climate change, Musk and Donald Trump might just have the trump card: Mass exodus to Mars. The billionaire entrepreneur says he can take anyone to Mars, but only if Trump becomes the next American president. In two years, SpaceX plans to launch uncrewed starships to Mars and in four, crewed missions. But if Harris wins the presidential election, “the bureaucracy currently choking America to death is guaranteed to grow”, thus spelling the end for the Mars programme and dooming humanity. While there are many who might acquiesce to making the red planet a red hot election issue, there might be a few naysayers as well. As Bertie Wooster might pose to the SpaceX founder, “What on Mars were you thinking, Musk?” | Getty Images