New year is around the corner and market is flooded with calendars. Indian government   has come out as usual with its official calendar.

The designers of the new ₹2,000 bill — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most memorable gift to the Indian economy this year — may not have delivered the most aesthetically pleasing work. But those working on the layout of the official government calendar for 2017 got the brief loud and clear.

Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu unveiled the government of India’s 2017 calendar yesterday and each one of the 12 months had one man common to it: Narendra Modi, in various garbs, hanging out with a range of characters. His (well-known) weakness for quaint headgears is apparent once again, as is evident from the helmet-wearing engineers to tribal people wearing peacock feather.

While the theme may not have come as a surprise to most, the prominence given to the images in contrast with the dates (which is the real point of a calendar) has raised a few smirks.

Similar one man show calendar of another head of state, that of Russian President Putin,  reached the Russian market a month earlier, though it was not an official one.

The Modi calendar has only 12 images of Modi as there are only twelve months. In 1937 the Nazis were smart enough to produce a calendar with a page for each week. Thus they could incorporate  52 different images of Hitler.

India is still a  working democracy governed under some what liberal Constitution. Let us hope it will remain so.