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“The external business environment was not good ... but there was no sense of anxiety within the organization, and everyone appeared to be eaten up with self-conceit ... I needed to tighten them up a bit and repeatedly reminded managers of the need to have the sense of crisis.”

The only thing stopping the show – both the onscreen talkshow and the sitcom itself – from descending into a swamp of self-conceit is Artie.

He could, with stony self-conceit, tide over tricky questions in press conferences with droll asides and wry humour that led his critics to call him the artful dodger in the tangled world of Indian politics.

They were “less venturesome” and “oversensitive”; prone to “priggish self-conceit”.

Isn’t he already too familiar, the maker of such icons as “Liberty Leading the People,” which recall a bygone France full of contradiction, hypocrisy and self-conceit?