A billion people and India cannot produce just one leader for the times? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been in office for two terms but rarely in power during that decade.

He has never held elected office, is a living lie in claiming an Upper House seat (itself a violation of the Westminster convention that the prime minister must be an elected member of Parliament's Lower House) from India's northeastern state of Assam when everyone knows he was born in what is now Pakistan and hails from Delhi, and has never been comfortable in any significant public speaking role.

Any political leader is in trouble when he becomes the object of ridicule in jokes popular across the country. In Delhi it became quite common for seminar chairs to ask people to turn their cellphones to MMS (the prime minister's initials) mode.