Game of the name Think Mahatma Gandhi -- think frail, half-clad, clever old man. Now think Mahatma Gandhi's family -- and you can't help but picture a whole bunch of equally frail, bent-over clever people of indeterminate age. Unfortunately, Tushar Gandhi, the Mahatma's 38-year-old great grandson, is far from frail or bent-over. He is clever though, judging from the smart way he has quickly disentangled himself from a deal with US-based CMG Worldwide on the branding of the Mahatma's name. A deal that was threatening to get hopelessly sticky. 'First I'd like to clarify that it wasn't a 'deal', it was an arrangement with CMG,' says Tushar, who is in the middle of some rushed last-minute campaigning for a friend who is standing for elections as an independent candidate in Allahabad. The arrangement, or deal, would have put Mahatma Gandhi alongside Marilyn Monroe and Ginger Rogers in the CMG hall of fame, and would have also ensured that the company got a percentage whenever the Mahatma's name was used to endorse a product. 'The company had sent me a format (for my permission to use the name) for a credit card company's commercial. I added a paragraph, saying that it was a provisional permission and would be finalised only if I was satisfied with the final commercial. Which meant that I should be convinced that it was not showing Bapuji in a negative light,' explains Tushar, adding that it was an arrangement for 'a one time permission only .' But even before the details of the arrangement got ironed out, he revoked the whole thing. 'I had to...because too many Gandhians had got into the fray and were saying all sorts of unsavoury things. I have grown up respecting these people, so I couldn't get into this kind of a mess with them.' The 'unsavoury things' obviously included allegations that Tushar would be making money from the Mahatma's name. In his defence, Tushar says the money promised to him by CMG would have been used to renovate Kasturba Gandhi's estate and for some other welfare work in Gujarat. Obviously the explanation did not satisfy other Gandhians. And as a result of all the wheeling-and-dealing and pulling out of the wheeling-and-dealing, this Gandhi reached his favourite place again -- newspaper headlines. He first got into the newspaper headlines when he sued STAR TV's Nikki Tonight over gay rights activist Ashok Row Kavi's now famous description of the Mahatma, not as Father of the Nation. He called him a baniya - which he was - but added that as a prefix to a word that expressed doubts about his parents' legal status - which was never in question. With more than 54 descendants of the Mahatma around, Tushar Gandhi owes his instant recall value to the Nikki Tonight show. Something that he happily acknowledges even today. 'I was lost in obscurity before that,' says Tushar as he remembers the furore the 1995 case caused. Through the years he has remained a close though a little irregular -- friend of the headlines. 'I keep doing something or the other which is what keeps me in the news....and I think that's where the CMG people also found me ... in the newspapers!' he says explaining how he continues to be the most famous of the Mahatma's descendants. Two years after the STAR TV case, he made a well-publicised trip to Allahabad to scatter some long-forgotten ashes of the Mahatma into the Ganga. Along with documenting his 'chance' discovery of the ashes, triggered by a newspaper report, Tushar Gandhi also used the occasion to hit out at the 'vitiated political atmosphere' in the country. In an attempt to do his bit to clean up that atmosphere, Tushar has been dabbling in politics for a while now. In 1999, he was expelled from the Mumbai unit of the Samajwadi Party for a period of six years for his criticism of party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav. The expulsion didn't deter him, and he joined the Congress soon after. 'I have always been interested in politics...I think it has to do with my family background,' he says. Growing up in a regular middle class family in Mumbai, he feels his well-travelled parents made life at home 'a little bit less like a typical Indian family of my time... we were a bit more liberal than normal Indian families.' From politics he has graduated to his present avtaar as an extremely net-savvy graphic designer. And if Tushar Gandhi is blazing a trail on the internet, can the Mahatma be far behind? Not for very long at any rate. Along with offering penitent hackers jobs and waging patriotic war for the use of 'dot. in' as opposed to dotcom or org, Tushar has also begun work on creating a site to host, what he calls the 'largest amount of archival material on Bapuji on the internet.' As head of the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation in Mumbai, Tushar has access to some of the resources, for his website which currently has over 250,000 pages of text and some five hours of audio and video on Mahatma Gandhi. Conceptualised over three years ago, some of the people Tushar roped in were NRI Indus Entrepreneurs boss Kanwal Rekhi and software guru Vijay Mukhi. And when he isn't working on Bapuji's electronic archives, or trying to sell the Mahatma as a brand name, how faithful is Tushar Gandhi to his Muse in his everyday life? 'I am very proud of my heritage...and I don't see my name as a handicap in any sense.' That doesn't mean Tushar has chosen to live the life of an ascetic. 'People expect all sorts of things because of my name... but I just live a very normal life, on my own terms.' And his terms include a well turned-out apartment in Mumbai's upscale Santa Cruz area. 'Look at it this way actually...' he says 'I am a sort of Gandhi in jeans.' Give or take a couple of kilos.