February 22, 1969 brave effort to sport a smile" and "the first thing he drew our attention to was a copy of the London Times Literary Supplement which, he said, he was reading". Not many of his colleagues shared Ghosh's sang-froid, however; one of them, Abha Maity, was almost in tears though she herself had won in her constituency. The Standard reporter's account: "When we offered her congratulations on her success, her comment, which was uttered almost in a crying voice, was, 'What is the use of congratulating when the party I belong to is going down?'" Hindustan Standard did its homework on the elections properly. As soon as all the results were declared, it published a district-wise breakdown of seats contested and won and votes polled by different parties; even more interesting, it also published a table giving the breakdown of the population of the 16 districts in terms of categories like industrial labour, agricultural labour, middle-class and Muslims. This kind of staff enterprise is often more useful to the reader than the efforts of professional Gallup-men.
