chances to trail his father and die in power.

Breakthrough coup, the next milestone?

On October 24, 2018, Ali had a stroke. Ali’s prolonged absence and state of health created internal political tensions in the country. It was this that provided another window of opportunity for the opposition. Eventually, the opposition asked the Constitutional Court to declare a vacancy in accordance with the Constitution. However, the Constitutional Court unsurprisingly judged otherwise and instead transferred some of the President’s powers to the Vice President and the Prime Minister.

What followed was the coup attempt, largely demonstrating that as discontent increases in Gabon against the Bongo dynasty and the neo-patrimonial system behind its state capture, the likelihood that sections of the armed forces, in this case the ‘militariat’, will attempt to overthrow Alion the opposite of a media overdrive—he booked a sprawling suite in a boutique club-hotel in Western Mumbai, and spent his days reading complex books about quantum physics and evenings playing tennis.

This wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed the actor’s career trajectory till now. Born in Patna to a father who was an engineer and a mother who was a homemaker, the 33-year-old has often taken a detour near the peak of success, or at least success as is conventionally understood. He dropped out of his engineering course months before graduation, he quit his popular TV show Pavitra Rishta when it was topping popularity charts, and a couple of years after his big-screen debut, he walked away from a lucrative contract with one of Bollywood’s