Britney Spears had better look out. Sharing space with her on YouTube — the GenX site for instant videos and gratification — is Lalu Prasad Yadav. Somebody has uploaded a small clip of the railway minister in Parliament, reciting a couplet while announcing this year’s rail budget. He starts in Hindi, and then does an on-the-spot translation into English that has every MP rocking. Even the otherwise sombre Speaker is chortling with his hands on his mouth. Britney Spears never had it this good.

The minister, clearly, is in charge — and loving every moment of it. A week after the railway budget, he sits in his office with a spittoon by his side. He switches off his mobile phone, wards off waiting reporters and gestures his aides to sit down. “Tête-à-tête,” he asks with his trademark sing-song tilt, rolling his tongue over every syllable, after we have, à la Lalu, done an on-the-spot translation of the word into Hindi.

Minutes later we realise that it’s not going to be a tête-à-tête — not by a long shot. It’s going to be a monologue.

“Uf-oh, mujhe suno naa. Mahilayen… (Listen to me, please. You women),” he says when we shove in a “But, don’t you think…” question. “That’s why there should be no reservation for women. Three women MPs kept disrupting the Prime Minister in the Lok Sabha today. I told Sonia Gandhi, ‘That’s why I am against this Women’s Reservation bill.’”

He doesn’t want to discuss politics either. “I salute politics. Fighting elections is our job, so what’s the big deal?” Instead, he wants to talk about the railways — what the Indian Railways mean to him and, better still, what he means to the railways. He has decided that he will tell us everything that we wanted to know about the railways but were afraid to ask. And some more.

“The railways are a Jersey cow, a sone ki chidhiya (a golden bird) but wealth and rotis don’t fall from the sky. When I took over (in 2004), I inherited huge losses from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government,” says the 60-year-old minister and former Bihar chief minister who ruled the state for 15 years. “Today, I have a cash surplus of Rs 69,000 crore. I want to bequeath a surplus of Rs 100,000 crore.”

The turnaround didn’t happen overnight — but came after a series of such moves as an increase in freight volumes. He goes on to list the rabbits he pulled out of his hat — optimising wagon use, IT connectivity to streamline ticketing, enhanced fiscal powers to the general managers, bonus for employees… For once, there are no one-liners. Instead, he gives us figures.

The government-appointed Rakesh Mohan committee had called the railways a “white elephant” heading towards bankruptcy.” Nitish Kumar (his predecessor) wanted to lay off 25 per cent of the workers. The previous government increased the freight and passenger fares several times. They wanted to import skills from abroad to spruce up the railways. They wanted to privatise its core sector,” he says, occasionally gesturing towards Sudhir Kumar, his officer on special duty, to fill in the details.

In some circles, Kumar is regarded as the architect of the celebrated turnaround. But, clearly, the political direction came from Yadav, who is in no doubt on how this “success” saga was scripted. “My philosophy was, work like a family, shoulder to shoulder. There was too much of Inquilab zindabad.”

He recalls spending 48 hours on railway tracks inspecting boulders, weighing cargo and pulling up errant railway men. “I worked like a man possessed. I found huge thefts in the freight carriages. My first job was to stop this chori.”

But charity, he indicates, didn’t begin at home — he recalls that his in-laws were fined for travelling in a train without a ticket. “I ordered that if they didn’t pay up, they should be sent to jail.”

So did his wife, former chief minister Rabri Devi, give him some grief on this? The question is asked when we are on our way out, and the railways as a subject has been suitably exhausted.

“She is very fair, much fairer than me. Those two salaas (brothers-in-law, Sadhu and Subhash Yadav) of mine, you have heard all the stories about them, haven’t you? So Rabri Devi and I have to be very careful. She is a very strong person who can see through anyone.”

She, he adds, is the commander-in-chief of the family — a herd of 350 cows, five children who live with her and a group of state legislators. “She has fed rotis and bhaat to all these MLAs, so if anyone gets too big for his boots she promptly puts him down.”

Yadav’s life, of course, is a bit of an open book — with just a few missing pages about a fodder scam that dragged him to jail when the NDA was in power. His wife took over from him as the chief minister of Bihar after the court case — on missing funds that had been earmarked for cattle feed — promised to become messy.

It was while he was behind bars that Yadav became a vegetarian. He was urged to do so, he says, by Shiva in a dream. “Do you believe in God? There’s no higher calling than faith,” he says, pulling out a gold chain with a thick locket of Sheronwali Ma, or Durga, from under his vest.

Clearly, these are good times for Yadav, whose father looked after cattle. The man who has often been described as the most colourful character in Indian politics is not the rustic wit that was once the media’s favourite punching bag. He wears his Argyle sweaters with élan — “My daughters get them: Pingle? Pringle? Something like that” — and talks ruefully about his apolitical offspring. “They came to Parliament for the first time this year to hear my budget. And that’s because I urged them to,” says the man who was drawn into politics during his college days and became a part of the J.P. movement.

His older son is a Krishna faithful and spends most of his time in Patna’s Iskcon while Tejaswi, the younger one, is a professional cricketer who was included as a fallback in the Under-19 team that came back triumphant from Kuala Lumpur last week. Three of his seven daughters are married.

India’s 63,000-km-long rail network may have morphed his image of a “joker” to that of a professional. But he also remembers his first tryst with a train, when he was a boy of nine or 10. Until then, he had pictured it as a “demon who chopped people into pieces.”

“My mother woke me at three in the morning and said leave, the birds have started chirping. She fed me some yoghurt, and I walked four or five kms to board the train. I went on a coal-fired train from Gopalganj to Patna. It looked like a bhooth (ghost). You city-bred people have only been in A.C. carriages; I am part of the lathak (hanging) people who travelled with coal dust in their eyes.”

Yadav is an A.C.-ed man himself these days. But his diet is still simple —consisting mostly of daal and bhaat, though he likes to teach his daughters ways to cook prawns and crabs in a traditional Bihari style. And when he gets the urge to eat something meaty, he says he does so while he sleeps. “I polish them off in my dreams.”

Yadav, like someone else before him, had a dream. Quite a bit of that seems to have come true. “I have grown a ‘phrutt’ tree,” he says about the railways in the YouTube clip, as the MPs roll over with laughter. But Yadav has had the last laugh.