Congress President Rahul Gandhi kept himself busy over the weekend on his two-day trip to Karnataka, ahead of next month’s Assembly elections in the state. By busy, we mean he spent the weekend interacting with locals, taking rides on the metro, clicking selfies with Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and buying books.

On Sunday afternoon, Gandhi surprised commuters on the Namma Metro in Bengaluru by boarding the train with the chief minister and posing for selfies with them. But that was only after he took a selfie with Siddaramaiah himself while they were buying metro tokens (video above).

After that they decided to take a stroll down Church Street and walked into a book store, emerging with a selection of five books, which reportedly included Perumal Murugan’s The Goat Thief, The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hanh and a book about Ikigai, a Japanese concept that means “a reason for being”. You can watch Gandhi purchasing the books – technically Siddaramaiah paid for the books and even got a discount – in the video below. Soon after, both Congress leaders headed out for lunch to Koshy’s, a popular joint in Bengaluru, and for some road-side kulfi.

Earlier in the day Gandhi interacted with safai karamcharis and promised abolition of contractual employment for safai karamcharis all over India if his party came to power in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

The Karnataka unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party couldn’t, however, resist taking a dig at Gandhi’s activities over the weekend on Twitter.

The Congress and BJP are both campaigning hard in poll-bound Karnataka, which is one of the three states in India that the Congress still governs.