Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah has a busy schedule. He's overseen a massive drive to make his party one of the world's biggest while also taking on the task of having to ensure it comes to power everywhere. While Shah is often described as a political mastermind who can pull strings anywhere in the country, India's infrastructure has an uncanny knack of being able to put everyone on the same level, sometimes literally. Late on Thursday night, the BJP President had to crawl out of a government guesthouse lift in Patna after it refused to open.

Shah, along with four colleagues, was stuck in the lift for 20 minutes between the ground and the first floor before the Central Reserve Police Force began a rescue operation that ended up taking another half an hour. The Times of India reported that all of those inside were "totally panic stricken," and that it took Shah another half an hour to get back to normal after the incident, which is what most of us would expect if we had to undergo the same ordeal.

What all of us don't have to deal with, however, is this turning into major national news, being reported on TV channels everywhere and then quickly turning into fodder for humour (and some exercise-based criticism) on twitter.







One rather enterprising twitter user actually predicted this might happen, after Home Minister Rajnath Singh himself had been stuck in a lift a little while ago.

And, as if this country doesn't do enough to caricature itself, the Bharatiya Janata Party is apparently concerned that the incident might have been deliberate.

Finally, the HuffingtonPost (or its algorithm) had a bit of fun with its "Also on the Huffington Post" portion of the page, below the news about Shah's rescue.