Mumbai, Oct. 12 :    Mumbai, Oct. 12:  Will he, won't he? Use a stick, that is. As Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee spent his third day in his Breach Candy room, speculation started on whether he would have to walk with a cane. And if he does, for how long. Dr Chittaranjan Ranawat, the New York surgeon who replaced Vajpayee's arthritic left knee, believes the Prime Minister would do well to use the cane for the rest of his life. 'Using a cane is a good thing because it takes a load off your weak knee,' he said. A senior surgeon at Breach Candy pointed out that walking without a cane will be difficult, at least for some time. 'Especially because his other knee is also afflicted with osteoarthritis,' said the doctor, who did not want to be named. The Prime Minister isn't saying, though. 'He may use it for a few days, but whether he will continue to do so, no one knows at present,' was all that his media adviser Ashok Tandon would say. For a Prime Minister whose ratings had plummeted after the Red Fort stumble three Independence Days ago, a stick can be more than a walking aid, especially when handling a motley of cantankerous allies. So believes communications specialist Alyque Padamsee. 'A stick can be a support or it can be a cane which can get people to do what you want to do, fast,' he said. 'My advise to the Prime Minister is to carry a lot of carrots and a big stick, a silver one that catches the sunlight and warns slackers that the pradhan mantri is on his way.' Socialite-writer Shobha De feels a nation which accepts the elderly as Prime Ministers should also be sympathetic to their old age problems. 'It is better to lean on a cane than stumble and fall as some Prime Ministers have in the past,' she said. Not all are willing to give bonus points to a Prime Minister-with-a-stick. 'If you run a government that responds with only knee-jerk reactions, you are bound to have problems with the knee,' a public relations expert said. 'Vajpayee carrying a stick is a metaphor for the BJP government which needs the crutch of the Sangh parivar and 23 coalition partners to stand up. The government has limped along, now the head of the government will mirror that limp,' he said. Franklin Roosevelt, he pointed out, achieved greatness despite his wheelchairs and crutches. 'His disability didn't matter, such was his intellectual depth,' the PR expert added. Vajpayee's camp, scampering to gauge the impact of a cane-aided Prime Minister, can take solace in history. Almost all great statesmen had their walking sticks that became a part of the myth surrounding them. Winston Churchill used one, not because of any debilitating disability but because it was part of Edwardian fashion to do so, as did Gandhi and Jinnah. Bill Clinton, Vajpayee's new-found friend in the West, too, had to use a cane, for a brief while, following a mishap.