Given Smriti Irani and The Telegraph’s history with headlines like ‘Aunty National’, we couldn’t help but fish out the front page of the Kolkata-headquartered daily first thing in the morning.

There are important lessons here: you don’t have to pun if you can’t. Also ‘Night of the Scorpion’? Just FYI, it’s a poem by Nissim Ezekiel, which beings thus: “The night my mother was stung by a scorpion…” Is Modi the scorpion? And Smriti Irani and Arun Jaitley, the mother(s)? Of TT perhaps? The possibilities are many. The poem’s supposed to be about motherhood at some meta level, but we really don’t get the context here.

Back to Delhi-based papers: Indian Express went with their classic state-it- as-it- is style.

The Times of India too kept it simple:

Ditto The Hindu, which went with: “Javadekar elevated, gets HRD as Smriti moves out”. The Hindustan Times chose to read into the reshuffle, telling us that the changes in the Cabinet were Modi’s way of punishing and rewarding his ministers.

Our favourite, though, was Dainik Bhaskar with its cheeky headline: “Sarkar Ki ‘Smriti’ Lauti“, to suggest that the government is beginning to remember its goals. In the body copy it urges readers to understand the word ‘smriti’ in the context of its actual meaning, which is memory.

Note to TT: this is how puns work.