Flush from its victory in the recent civic polls, the West Bengal state government, led by the feisty Mamata “Didi” Banerjee, is mulling a complete ban on electricity and bathing. The strongly pro-poor Didi said, “Hey, if something’s not being used by lesser privileged people in society, it ought to be illegal. We looked around in slums and found that people over there don’t have access to electric power and are not in a position to have daily showers. Hence, we’re planning to ban these items.” When queried on the practicality of implementing such a ban, Didi reassured reporters by saying, “Of course, the ban will not be total. We’ll still need electricity to torture cartoonists.”

In a bid to come out of financial doldrums, Kingfisher Airlines announced that it would convert itself into a social network.  The new entity, which will be called “facepalmbook”, will soon announce an IPO from which it expects to raise tens of billions of dollars. “For the last several months, we’ve delayed and cancelled flights thus causing customers to waste enormous amounts of time at airports. With this new social network, we expect to help them waste time at home, without ever having to visit an airport,” said the flamboyant Vijay Mallya who plans to hand over reins of the new entity to his son, Sid.

“In this new structure, employees will cease to be employees and instead become our ‘friends’ on facepalmbook. This way, they won’t receive salaries, but can grow as much food as they want on imaginary farms. Plus, we’re going to keep all the cool things about Kingfisher, such as in-flight entertainment, gourmet meals and glamorous stewardesses. We’re dropping only those things that have hurt us over the years, namely customers.”, chipped in Sid helpfully.

As Syria descended into chaos and UN inspectors foraged for signs of carnage in villages, India’s Sachin Tendulkar called on the Syrian president, Bashar Assad to stand firm and not step down. “I don’t believe you can tell someone when they ought to retire or step down. They should be allowed to leave on their own terms when the time comes”, he asserted. When asked about polls which point to Assad’s plummeting popularity, Tendulkar remarked, “Numbers aren’t everything. As long as Assad continues to be passionate about genocide and vendetta, he ought to keep going.” In response, Kapil Dev called on the entire United Nations organization as well as Syrian rebels to retire immediately.

In an innovative and radical twist, which promises to generate more controversy, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal has called for combining even larger groups of examinations into one. “First, we combined all other engineering examinations with IIT-JEE. Now, we’ll take this a  major step further by combining this with all other exams such as eye exams, hearing tests, blood tests, driver’s license tests and colonoscopy into one mother of all unified exams (MOAUE). My fond hope for Indians is that any person should be able to take just MOAUE and be able to come out with spectacles, hearing aids, blood group type, driver’s license, a bowel movement patterns report as well as admission to a college at the end of it.”

The What Ho! report: Headlines, baseless rumors and no news whatsoever. We read the Times of India so you shouldn’t have to