With just under a year to go to the Lok Sabha polls, I shudder to think at the mish-mash India is faced with if neither the Congress nor the BJP were to get a majority – or at least emerge as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha. Read more

In a week full of scams and scandals and exposes all over the country, just some random thoughts about my overview of the state of the nation – or rather its leaders. Read more

Contrary to what some politicians say, I do not believe the Sangh Parivar’s latest stress on Hindutva is a nine-day wonder that will disappear with the Kumbh Mela. I have reason to be convinced that it is a clever, well thought out strategy and that those who are propagating it know even as they call for the Ram temple in Ayodhya that the temple issue is a self-defeating goal. 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

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

When Maharashtra’s Home Minister R R Patil first mooted the transfer of Bombay’s police commissioner Arup Patnaik a day after some Muslim groups ran riot at the Azad Maidan on August 11, 2012, I am told, Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan told him, “If Patnaik goes, so do you”. Read more

I was sitting in the middle of the road, atop my brand new leaf-green VIP suitcase, just outside the gates of the Indian Airlines office in Tezpur, where the airlines bus had deposited me just a few minutes ago, and not knowing where to go from there when I spotted a few men carrying daos and some old-fashioned bows and arrows making their way towards me. Read more

It has to be a significant moment in Indian history that, for the first time in the nearly five decades of the Shiv Sena’s existence, Bal Thackeray has been so publicly endorsed by the Congress as one of its own. Read more

Noticed a little but not much commented upon earlier this year was the fact that for the first time in a decade or more, the BJP had lost its Ayodhya seat in the Uttar Pradesh assembly. Now the party has lost a graduates’ seat from the Konkan which it had held for 40 years in the Maharashtra Legislative Council. Read more

Bal Thackeray’s maverick ways have always led both his friends and rivals to underestimate him politically. Read more