Didi: I used saucepan for bath in a US hotel
In life as in politics, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee is known for unconventional ways, like when she used saucepans for taking baths during her 1998 trip to New York or bought lip balms, mistaking them for lipsticks.
“I had left a saucepan in the bathroom because in American hotels, it is difficult to get buckets or mugs. When I entered my room, I bumped into the cleaning lady and she was quite bewildered about the saucepan in the bathroom,” Ms Banerjee writes in her just-published memoirs My Unforgettable Memories.
“I tried to explain to her that I used it to have my bath, but she just couldn’t understand,” she recalls.
She once rode pillion on a motorbike in rural Bengal and even now wears hawai chappals (rubber slippers) to office.
She was candid enough to say in her book: “When it comes to things like this (shopping), I’m not very smart; in fact, kids today are far smarter.”
She said she had never been fond of dressing up and wearing makeup. The lip balm mixup was while returning from the same trip, as part of a UN delegation.
“For the girls in my family I bought chapsticks (a brand of lip balm), believing they were lipstick. When I gave it to them, I said: ‘See, aren’t the colours pretty?’ They said: ‘Yes, but they are all the same colour... These are chapsticks’.”
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