Page 157 - Demo

beating around the bush. Someone should check his attendance with the Lok Sabha secretariat, it must have been close to 100%, he was always there except for reasons of health or some other exigency.After question hour there would be the zero hour %u2013 if there was a lot of noise and confusion, he would go up to the Central Hall for a cup of coffee and come back into the House after it settled down, instead of staying on till the lunch hour as many did. The Northern Railways ran a restaurant on the first floor where they served a thali and that's where he would eat every day. Almost every day he would go up to the railway restaurant and have his lunch there. He was a member of most clubs in Delhi %u2013 the Gymkhana, the Golf Club, the India International Centre and so on but he'd never go there for lunch though there was ample time. Then we would come down and then he would say, you must excuse me for 15 minutes. There was a library displaying magazines. It had a couch and he would pull the partition over there and he'd lie down on the couch, he'd never go back to his house. When I asked him why, he'd say I'm comfortable here. After 15-20 minutes he'd wash and then go straight back and attend the session. That's how seriously he took it.%u201d%u201cIf parliamentary etiquette is something younger people want to learn they ought to read about how he conducted himself. Whenever he got up to speak there was a pin-drop silence in the house because he never disturbed anybody and he didn't talk nonsense. That was the kind of personality that he had %u2013 he was the least obtrusive kind of person. I noticed that whenever 143