If this were a leap year, there would have been a February 29, instead of March 1 following February 28. And leaplings, as those born on February 29 are called, are regarded by popular belief to be “rare, due to the rarity of their birthday”. This belief about leaplings is pure and simple imagination. But two of the type did have those qualities — a coincidence.

On February 29, 1896, in an obscure village of the Bulsar (now Valsad) district of Bombay Presidency, arrived a boy, the first of eight children, born to Vajiaben, the wife of a somewhat poor Brahmin school teacher called Ranchhodji Nagarji Desai. He was named Morarji. The parents could not have guessed in their most audacious dreams that the teacup-handle-eared boy would become a deputy collector, an MLA and minister in the same Presidency under the British Raj, and then, with India winning Independence, be Bombay’s chief minister, India’s finance minister, home minister, deputy prime minister and then, prime minister (PM). If also an opinionated, conservative, dour moralist, annoying more people than he impressed, but at the end of the day, respected for his acumen as an administrator and probity. Morarji Desai was capable of doing some unexpected things. In prison during the Emergency, his biographer Arvindar Singh tells us , he observed prison rules scrupulously, declining to talk to a friend who had managed to smuggle himself into the premises, as his name was not among those permitted to........

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