Sorry, no close-ups and no more questions! He raises his hands and jostles his way, trying to get round the crowd of reporters with microphones and notebooks and photographers zooming on their cameras. It’s a difficult situation altogether, as he faces the bunch of scribes who will pen or air everything in public that could overtly put him in the doghouse. Unwillingly, he has to answer their queries, on top of being grilled inside by the members of the investigation commission, for some long hours already. Even the most energetic one in the line-up, who had earlier enjoyed facing cameras and dared to push his opinions and convictions in public through a series of tele-interviews, now finds these journos repulsive as they are the ones to poke their noses into his privacy without any let-up.

Needlessly torn between the devil and the deep blue sea, he has to brave the reporters with a pretence that nothing went wrong inside during the grilling. It’s always when he lands himself in situations like this that he either shrugs things off his shoulders and tries to find an easy scapegoat, or, with his typical histrionic smile and faked confidence, attempts to air in public that the team of interrogators could not get the goods on him and that he has nothing to worry about the interrogation.

He takes moral responsibility for everything he did in the past, wrongs or rights, but he still does not have a clue on how the wrongs happened. Or even if he has a clue, he knows he is not the one who played a hand in it. Yet someone else who is grilled admits having done nothing bad since someone above him, by authority, elected him to play the baddie. As for himself, he was a very small fish in a pond. Really a great man — he doesn’t in the least realise that every play of smile on his face he throws at the camera fails to click and the public do not get exactly the kind of picture he would like them to form about his superior moral virtues.

Finally when he finds his way to his chauffeur and slips in his car, he wipes off his forehead a little way away, realising that he is now in the soup he made himself. Momentarily though, he thanks God for escaping those close-ups.