When Fernandes refused to attend office for 3 days after being named Rly minister!

After being allocated the railways portfolio in 1989 in the V P Singh government, George Fernandes refused to go to Rail Bhavan to attend office for three days.

Reason: He had led the biggest railway strike in Asia in 1974 and headed railway unions and now how could he be sitting across them at the table.

This anecdote was shared by his close aide Jaya Jaitly in her book "Life Among the Scorpions", published in 2017.

Then after he joined office, the guard at the ministry's entrance did not let him in and told him to get an entrance slip made at the reception first.

She also mentioned several other interesting facts about Fernandes - his love for Harry Potter books, he never owned a comb, and devouring economic surveys and carrying them wherever he went.

Fernandes died Tuesday at the age of 88 here. He was suffering from Alzheimer's disease for several years and had recently contracted swine flu.

On the V P Singh ministry, Jaitly wrote: "In late 1989, as the National Front government set itself up, the walls of power came up alongside. V P Singh, with his typical caginess, kept even his closest colleagues on tenterhooks, informing them that they would become ministers only half an hour before they were expected to be sworn in."