It is always a good experience to step away from your regular circle and meet people outside of your comfort zone.

I had such an experience a couple of days ago, meeting someone from the Hindi media segment, who currently runs a business that caters to the multimedia needs of mostly rural politicians.

While we were on the subject of when the general elections are likely to be announced he said one rather curious thing:

"If the Congress is smart, it will announce the elections in February, than later."

I was kind of amused by the statement, because it flies in the face of the current wisdom to not take the recent Assembly election results as an indicator of the possible General election outcome in 2009.

And he had an equally interesting rationale to the argument, which was that anti-incumbency is closely tied to weather and other interesting factors.

He said that anti-incumbency is highest when the weather is hot and people are irritable.

Keeping that in mind, February has absolutely gorgeous weather, which gets people in a really nice mindset, reminding them of all the good things in life than the negative ones.

Who would have thought that?