Growing up in a small town with two sisters and moving to Bombay to live with family friends who only had three sons, I never knew what -or who- was not a gentleman. Read more

At eight in the morning on December 20, before the votes have begun to be counted, Hemant Fitter, a spokesperson of the Gujarat Parivartan Party, is predicting a certain defeat for Narendra Modi. Read more

Sometimes, I despair for the Shiv Sena after Bal Thackeray. Many of the party’s leaders have learnt well from the Sena supremo but I believe it is high time those who have inherited Bal Thackeray’s party unlearn all that the Sena tiger taught them and chart thir own course, for that is the only road to survival. Read more

“You used to be such a good girl! What’s happened to you in the last month or so?” Bal Thackeray once asked me sometime in the mid-1990s. Read more

Back in those days when I was at college and Subramanian Swamy was a Havard-returned guest lecturer at our university, I remember one of our professors of political science watch the man grimly as he spoke more on economics than on politics. Read more

Years ago, when I was aspiring to become a journalist and had just about got my first job in a newspaper my maternal uncle a high ranging bureaucrat in the Madhya Pradesh cadre expressed both contempt time sorrow time that his niece had chosen to become a reporter. He had wanted me to sit for civil services exams instead or at least for some bank entrance tests. That would be more honest work than becoming a journalist, he said. Read more

When I first met Kanshi Ram as a rookie journalist, he had just founded the Bahujan Samaj Party. It was election time in the 1980s and he had no hope in hell of winning even a single seat, despite his sharp focus on Dalit welfare in the country. Read more

In a recent interview to an English TV channel, I was both startled and delighted to see Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi tongue-tied – though that’s a mild word for his reaction – to a question on whether he thinks he should apologise for 2002 to be able to clear his path to New Delhi. Read more

Some years ago I wrote this story about Giani Zail Singh in my column ‘anandan ON WEDNESDAY’ which appears in the print edition of the newspaper every, well, Wednesday. I guess it bears repeating in another context. Zail Singh had become President of India just as I started off as a rookie in journalism and all I had heard about him were wise cracks about his bumbling ways. Read more

If what anti-corruption crusader Anjali Damania says about Nitin Gadkari is true, then there could be no greater tragedy for the Bharatiya Janata Party that is systematically getting exposed and isolated with each passing week. And there could be nothing more dangerous to Gadkari’s personal and political future. Read more