BJP candidate Rajeev Chandrasekhar's wife and son who keep themselves far from the political limelight reveal what it is like to campaign for the first time.
'If the NDA comes to power with 320-330 plus seats, then we could see some correction. We could possibly see a level of 19,500 to 20,000.' 'If the NDA comes to power with a majority of 400-plus, we could see the markets going to about 23,500-24,000 levels.' 'And from there we could see some correction because markets are expensive at this point of time and a correction is overdue.'
'The markets will correct, and they are bound to correct. The boom will turn into bust.' 'When this bust happens, people would lose like they have lost in the past.' 'Whatever you have made possibly in the last couple of years, you may lose in a couple of weeks. That's very much possible.'
'India mattered to him and he wanted to matter to India.'
'... dividing society not just on religious lines, but also creating rift in families and among brothers and sisters.'
'The Congress wants to distort the very fabric of Indian society because they are obsessed with vote bank politics.'
'I have had occasion to work with Bill Gates as a young engineer, and am one of the few people in India who has interacted with Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.' 'I have worked with Andy Grove at Intel, so I know what bright and great people are like, but Modiji is a different level of perfection.'
'Pura phas gaya woh... barbad, satyanash ho gaya woh.' 'Usko ticket bhi diya, election bhi ladha woh; ganda video bhi bahar aa gaya; hamara izzat bhi nikal diya woh; abhi letter ke baare main pooch ke kya hota hai?'
'When I stepped down from the (United Nations) secretary general's race, the first visitor I had was a former minister of the Vajpayee government inviting me to the join the BJP.'
'The nation cannot afford a government indifferent to its plight/'
'Not just Maharashtra, the Congress has not fielded even one Muslim candidate from Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Goa.'
'Can we force somebody to contest and fight an election when they don't want to contest an election?'
As the curtain falls on the campaign for the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat on Wednesday, April 24, a ringside view of the closing ceremonies.
'Can you imagine that Surat's voters won't have any say now in exercising their fundamental right to choose a candidate of their own choice? This is what the BJP has reduced India's democracy to.' 'With this ugly act, in one stroke, the BJP has disenfranchised the voters of Surat.'
'This might prove to be a temporary gain for the BJP, but at a huge cost to the people of Gujarat and democracy in India.'
24 hours before campaigning ends in Thiruvanathapuram, Archana Masih/Rediff.com discovers Shashi Tharoor and his BJP rival Rajeev Chandrasekhar are busy getting their message across to voters.
'If people don't see you, they might be hesitant, but once they see you, they are confident that this is the person they will vote for,' says political debutant Shambhavi Choudhury, 25, alumnus of the Lady Sriram College and the Delhi School of Economics.
'The BJP is not as mighty a political force in Odisha as it is made out to be.'
'The Congress is trying to reinvent itself -- the caste census demand, OBC emphasis, the anti-corporate thrust, especially on Adani etc -- all this is not standard Congress strategy.'
'The 2020 assembly election was a Tejaswi Yadav election; whereas this is a Lalu Yadav election. It is his plan.'