This time last year, Raj Babbar's family was truly worried. The Congress had plucked him out of Ferozabad where he had won the fiercely contested by-poll - defeating Yadav bahu and UP chief minister Akhilesh's wife Dimple in 2009, and planted him in Ghaziabad as their glamour candidate - against the AAP's Shazia Ilmi and the BJP's General V.K. Singh in 2014. All three were celebrity candidates who blazed headlines in their own different ways.

This time last year, Ghaziabad had already gone to the polls and the results were nail-bitingly expected a month later. Raj Babbar who had been an MP for four terms (one in the Rajya Sabha, three in the Lower House) was on shaky ground for the first time in two decades of intense politics. He was not only aware of the growing clamour for Modi that was favouring General Singh, but his own party member S.P. Goel - who was the sitting MP in Ghaziabad - was disgruntled that the actor had been parachuted into his constituency. But the Congress needed a celebrity name to stand up to the General, even if it didn't help in the final results.

This time last year, the Babbar family was justified in its anxiety because Raj did end up losing to Gen. Singh and the Modi wave. It meant that for the first time in two decades, Raj Babbar was no longer an MP. But the Congress always watched out for him. When he'd lost the general election in 2009, he was given another chance to contest the by-election in Ferozabad where he defeated Dimple Yadav and romped back into Parliament. The party has now backed him again after his loss to V.K. Singh in 2014 and has sent him to the Rajya Sabha as its nominee from Uttarakhand.

But win or lose, all the three high-profile candidates of Ghaziabad have continued to woo the limelight. Shazia jumped ship and sailed into prime time TV as a BJP spokesperson. General V.K. Singh is part of the Modi Cabinet as minister of development, northeast region, and he's also the soldier-hero who led from the front during the recent rescue mission in Yemen, thus staying in the headlines.

A few weeks ago, daughter Juhi Babbar glowed as she happily told me, "All of us are so happy that Papa has been nominated to the Rajya Sabha. We know he'll do a lot of good work there." With his re-entry into the Upper House, Congress party member Raj Babbar is an MP again. The first time he was in the Rajya Sabha was when the Samajwadi Party had sent him there in 1994.

Much party-hopping and politics have featured in his life since then but being an MP and a newsmaking celebrity have been consistent features. Raj was barely back in the Rajya Sabha when the spotlight turned on him for reasons that had nothing to do with him. Last Thursday, when the cameras filmed Dalwai and Rao, the two Congress MPs who snoozed in the Rajya Sabha during the important discussion on a farmer's tragic suicide, Raj Babbar was right there.

In direct contrast to his somnolent colleagues, Raj was wide awake and alert. In fact, he was so engrossed in the speeches that he didn't notice Dalwai and Rao fast asleep just behind him. "I wish I'd known," he shrugged when I asked him why he hadn't woken them up. A wide awake Raj Babbar means the BJP and the Samajwadi Party, his two bugbears, had better watch out. Delhi just got hotter.

A hot seat has been bagged by former Delhi Police commissioner Neeraj Kumar who has been picked to head the anti-corruption unit of the BCCI. Known to be extremely close to Rajeev Shukla, Neeraj Kumar is a man of many parts. Along with taking care of the capital's law and order, Neeraj was fellow Bihari Prakash Jha's vital police contact on films like Gangajaal and Apaharan, providing the filmmaker with script inputs and accurate details on the functioning of the police. He's an integral part of the Gangajaal sequel too (still to be released). The top cop-turned-BCCI sleuth has also written some episodes of the TV serial Mungerilal Ke Haseen Sapne and was the force behind the authentic writing and execution of the TV show Police Files Se .

Besides all this, Neeraj Kumar is writing a fictionalised insider's book which is ready for printing. And now, apart from his practical knowledge of the police force, Neeraj Kumar will also have first-hand dope on the murky world of Indian cricket. Wonder whether his close encounters with corruption in cricket will be poured into a book or into a film script. Either way, Delhi sure is sizzling.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author