On Wednesday evening, with an A-lister audience breaking into applause, three aspiring gladiators in the national arena vowed to join forces.

It was hard not to egg on such an instinctive, if romantic, compact; harder still as I found myself on the perch of moderator.

For those just joining in, Arvind Kejriwal of Aaam Admi Party (AAP), the best known among the three political strugglers at this point of time, made the first offer. But the tone had been set by the charming Meera Sanyal, a former banker-turned candidate from south Mumbai in 2009, who had lost to Milind Deora and a prominent Shiv Sainik.

Accused later in the evening for representing a “boutique brand of politics,” the INSEAD-Harvard alum, made a persuasive case for her noveau attempt at clean politics, “because the market today is ready for it”.

I concur, not entirely out of the guilt that it had been my duty to remind the audience that Sanyal had polled less than 11,000 votes.

She took my punch with grace; in fact, used the momentum to explain what she and her husband, Ashish, were up against, eschewing shady funding, committed to dissave less than the Rs 16-lakh spending limit prescribed by the Election Commission of India (ECI). Surprisingly, the Sanyals ended up booking Rs 9 lakh, and topping the charts!

A moment’s silence followed as the admiral’s daughter narrated how a political warhorse attempted to woo her into his grand old party. When she wasn’t game, this good samaritan, embodying the ancien regime’s impatience with independent candidates, suggested she went over to their principal opposition party!

“As I rejected that idea, too, I was asked what I intend to do. I heroically declared, 'I’ll keep trying till I win’.”

Pat came the reply, “Then you’ll lose till you die!”

RK Misra built the coalition from where Sanyal left. The “Lead India” winner, who I politely introduced as someone who has failed his potential after The Times of India marketing machine in 2008 launched him with masses of publicity, gave the evening a strategic tone. “Elections 2014 (or earlier) are going to see deeper fault lines among Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party.” (NB: Misra has joined – and left – both.)

“As things get worse,” by Elections 2019 (or earlier) Misra sees that a political group like his own “with even 10 members of parliament will get three ministerial berths.”

“That’s our aim,” the IITian-turned-serial entrepreneur who retired at 40 declared with a straight face, addressing naysayers that small parties can’t make a difference. “If we can make a difference even in three ministries, we would’ve made a beginning,” he said.

I also liked Misra’s formulation of the voter aged 18-28. “Do you know why we see them wearing headphones, shut to the rest of us?” he asked, before answering: “They turn to headphones not because they don’t want to hear us…they do that because they aren’t being heard!”
Hope Misra’s Nav Bharat remains wired to his finding.

The stage was set for Kejriwal. In softly spoken Hindi, he explained how the AAP is being built brick by brick; how obliterating the public’s deep associations of Congress isn’t easy; that Big Brother is no longer hurtling lathis at his cadres and IT notices on AAP’s donors.

Importantly, how he never said, “sab businessman chor hain.” Over to the businessmen now!