Two things went wrong in Delhi last week. One was a weather sensor at Mungeshpur, which measured the peak temperature at a record-breaking 52.9 degrees Celsius, and which was later found to be a three-degree overestimation.
The other was a clutch of exit polls that predicted a magnificent victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP, in which the party and its allies were expected to get 350 to 400 seats in the Lok Sabha. It turns out that the political pundits were as off as the weather experts.
With the final tally yet to come, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance is now hovering between 290 and 300 seats; but there's a lot more to the verdict after India's toughest and bitterest electoral battle since the end of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's Congress party-led Emergency rule in 1977. The details show strange patterns that might drive us to say curiously contradictory things about the mandate, where the wisdom of the crowd is as fascinating as it is intriguing.
I can imagine Congress leader Rahul Gandhi sending a message to his headquarters, as leader of his Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), which the BJP carefully called the INDI Alliance to avoid an acronym trap. The telegram may well read, "Team INDIA lost. But mission accomplished."