Tete-a-tete with Lord Swraj Paul

Kolkata, April 10, 2013: The last two days turned out to be very hectic for me. On the evening of April 9 I hosted a dinner in honor of Lord Swraj Paul at the The Taj Bengal Hotel. I had invited only the diplomats and few industrialists at the dinner apart from few senior journalists and editor friends.

There was a good turnout of the guests and even the Governor of West Bengal, His Excellency, Shri M K Narayanan was kind enough to attend the dinner.

I had my apprehensions of keeping the dinner timings from 7 to 10 pm, but all the guests arrived on time.

The next morning, April 10, I organized the second in the series of tete-a-tete at the Souk in Taj Bengal with Lord Swraj Paul.

This time Harshvardhan Neotia was in conversation with Lord Paul who was in city after four years.

The first tete-a-tea had taken place at The Oberoi Grand with Anurag Basu in conversation with Roopa Ganguly and Ina Puri. But somehow my comfort level with The Taj is higher and thus the second event took place at the Souk.

After the interesting chat with Lord Paul, in which he revealed very interesting and lesser-known incidents and aspects of his life, I went to the United Kingdom mission for renewing my British visa which is expiring next month. For UK, the applicants have to go in person and give their finger print impressions.

My appointment was at 1:30 pm but till 2:15 pm I could see that my serial number in the would take two more hours. The visa office was crowded and there was no place to sit there. I often wondered why is it so that there’s always a long queue for visas to the US, UK and Canada.

Thank god that lady at one on the counters recognized me and then I was through in 15 minutes. Tomorrow will also be another busy day for me as I have committed my presence to many events.
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