Not a pretty picture, Didi

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Mamata clicks prospective tourist spots on her way to Kalimpong. Picture by Amit Datta

March 1: Click, click, click…. iPad in hand, chief minister Mamata Banerjee put her trend-spotting skills to good use near Kalimpong this afternoon.

A little while later, had she turned south and summoned superhuman skills to zoom in on a corner called Jadavpur, she would have punched only one button: delete, delete, delete….

The scene at Jadavpur was far removed from the picture postcard scenes the chief minister was capturing so that the spots in the hills could be developed as tourist centres.

At the constituency where Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee bit the dust nine months ago but drew sizeable crowds last evening, the mighty Trinamul Congress was struggling to fill the road this evening as the party's me-too padayatra crawled forward.

Today's Trinamul procession was a warm-up to the reverse walkathon Mamata has threatened to undertake on Saturday when she is expected to retrace the route of Bhattacharjee who had protested the attack on a CPM office on the day of the general strike.

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Manish Gupta during the Jadavpur padayatra. Picture by Sanat Kumar Sinha

A host of Trinamul leaders — among the ministers were Partha Chatterjee and Manish Gupta who defeated Bhattacharjee — today walked (Bhattacharjee was on a jeep yesterday) from Jadavpur's 8B bus stand to Gangulybagan.

If thousands of local CPM workers, sympathisers and residents had lined Bhattacharjee's route last evening, less than half the number accompanied Mamata's lieutenants today.

The turnout was so low that Trinamul workers were ferried in from different parts of the city. "There is no denying that party workers and sympathisers from across the city joined today's procession. While Partha-da and Sovan (mayor Sovan Chatterjee) brought supporters from Behala and Tollygunge, Sudip-da (junior Union minister) brought supporters from north Calcutta," said a Trinamul leader.

Trinamul MP Subrata Bakshi, who had joined the procession, put a spin. "Today's procession was just a prelude to our big show on Saturday when Mamatadi would walk," Bakshi said.

Some leaders suggested, only half in jest, that they never wanted today's "semi-final" to be big and rob the Saturday "final" of its sheen.

One flop show doesn't make a summer but the contrast between Jadavpur yesterday and today was hard to miss.