The prime of Ms Priti Patel
The one really unexpected guest at Rupert Murdoch's wedding celebration last week was the employment minister Priti Patel, 43, who turned up at St. Bride's Church just off Fleet Street with her husband, Alex Sawyer.
Murdoch, 84, and the one time Texan model, Jerry Hall, 59, came to "the journalists' church" a day after their registry office wedding to have their union blessed.
I cannot imagine that Priti knows Murdoch personally so why was she invited?
She is currently very much in the news as one of six members of the Cabinet who has decided to back a British pullout from the European Union in the June 23 referendum.
This places Priti in the opposite camp to David Cameron, who is campaigning for the UK to remain a member.
Maybe Murdoch admires Priti because she and the Justice Secretary Michael Gove (also a Brexit supporter) were the only two members of the Cabinet who were invited to St. Bride's. Cameron was conspicuous by his absence.
Priti recognises that Cameron has gone out of his way to promote her. He appointed her his Indian "diaspora champion" in November 2013 while they were on a visit to Delhi and Calcutta. After he won the general election in May last year, Cameron gave her a seat at the Cabinet table.
"I am very conscious of the fact that I have basically gone against my Prime Minister," Priti told me. "I found it an incredibly difficult decision."
Incidentally, Priti is a greater admirer of Mamata Banerjee, whom she met in July last year in London and in January this year during the global summit in Calcutta. Priti was delighted when Mamata arranged for her visitor from London to be welcomed by dancing girls at the airport.
As a British minister, Priti obviously cannot comment on the Assembly polls but she did describe Mamata to me as "a force of nature actually - she is a very energetic lady, she is a visionary as well; she has been very clear in terms of her hopes and aspirations for West Bengal."
What future for Priti, though? Will she be promoted, demoted or sacked when the Prime Minister reshuffles his Cabinet after the referendum?
Cameron will be very hurt Priti chose principle over loyalty but being a patrician Englishman he would perhaps have respected her less if she hadn't.
Indian voices
Sunil Khilnani's has not been the only Indian voice on BBC Radio 4. Listening to a series called The Museum of Lost Objects last week, I thought the presenter sounded Indian.
The series "traces the histories of 10 antiquities or cultural sites that have been destroyed or looted in Iraq and Syria". And the presenter was talking engagingly about the winged-bull, a huge 2,700-year-old sculpture that stood guard at the gates of one of the most fabled cities in antiquity - Nineveh, in modern day Mosul, northern Iraq.
According to the BBC, "militants from the Islamic State group defaced the winged-bull in February 2015, almost a year after seizing control of the city".
I listened, fascinated by both the presenter's silken voice and what he was saying.
He turned out to be none other than Kanishk Tharoor, Shashi Tharoor's twin son by his first wife, Tilottama Mukherji.
Now that the British Broadcasting Corporation has given such a nice job to the New York-based Kanishk, author of Swimmer Among the Stars, a collection of short stories - on grounds of talent alone, I am sure - perhaps his dad could consider waiving the booty he is demanding from Britain for its imperial misdemeanours (see Shashi's Oxford Union speech).
As they say in football, the boy done good.
Wrong accent
Finally, here was yet another Indian on Radio 4 but he spoke with an American accent.
This time, however, I knew exactly who it was - Professor Venkatraman Ramakrishnan.
He revealed that when he won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2009, he was attacked by some in India because of his American accent.
"They thought I was putting it on," he told Jim Al-Khalili, presenter of a popular science programme, The Life Scientific.
I left everything to listen to Venki.
He was born in Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu in 1952, departed for the US at the age of 19, and has been working since 1999 at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Had he got into an IIT in India, the chances are that he would have stayed and most probably not got a Nobel Prize but he had not prepared for the tough entrance exam and failed to get in, he admitted.
The fateful decision was switching from physics to molecular biology in the US and later making the move from Utah, where he and wife Vera were very happy, to Cambridge, even though this meant "I had to take a substantial pay cut".
Last year, Venki was elected president of the Royal Society, the world's most prestigious scientific body. His ambition is to make science "more central in our lives", he said.
Delhi posting
The Honourable Sir Dominic Asquith, who flies to Delhi later this week to take over from Sir James Bevan as Britain's new high commissioner, is as pukka a sahib as you are likely to get.
Sir Dominic, 59, is the younger son of the 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, and a great-grandson of H.H. Asquith, a former British prime minister.
He has served as Her Majesty's ambassador to Iraq (2006-2007), Egypt (2007-2011) and Libya (2011-2012), where he was injured when a rocket propelled grenade hit his convoy.
He is clearly old school and has almost certainly mastered his India briefs (containing entertaining biographies of senior Indian politicians - eg. "likes a drink, has had several wives, some of them his own").
Kiss & tell
Padma Lakshmi's "kiss & tell", for which she would have been paid a generous sum by the now defunct News of the World, has been treated with great respect by the New York Times ("Padma Lakshmi Opens Up About Rushdie in Memoir").
According to the NYT, "Ms. Lakshmi said in an interview with the People magazine that she told Mr Rushdie that she was writing about their marriage. And he said, 'You have the right to tell your side of the story as you see it,' Ms Lakshmi said."
She is travelling around the US, promoting her "324-page memoir", Love, Loss and What We Ate, and may tour the UK as well. India might prove more problematic without Salman Rushdie by her side, as happened in the past.
Our Padma, who does not suffer from false modesty, got away with telling the Today show on NBC: "I am going to own my history."
The Daily Mail was altogether less respectful: "Padma Lakshmi showcases her ample cleavage in plunging dress as she heads off to her book signing in NYC."
Tittle tattle
Something to look forward to: the release on April 8 of The Man Who Knew Infinity. This film is on the life of the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan with Dev Patel in the title role, and Jeremy Irons as G.H. Hardy, who worked with him at Trinity College, Cambridge.
