I haven't seen many prime ministers closely; the ones I really saw and knew closely were Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh. But if we take all the prime ministers since Independence, I would rate Vajpayee the greatest second only to Jawaharlal Nehru. And there were a lot of commonalities between the two, if you look into their character and personality. I may be wrong, but that's the way I perceive it.

Vajpayee was a politician par excellence. He was as close to Chanakya as you get, but he never gave that impression. He was a mesmerising orator; nobody in India can come anywhere near him. He understood human beings, which is a great attribute, and he was a gem of a human being himself. It was a privilege to have seen him closely, to have worked with him. Those of us in the PMO who had interacted with him, were treated like family. And we felt like family. In his family, they used to call him baap-ji, and that's how we too used to refer to him.