The February civic elections in Bombay are the only elections since my coming of age that I have missed out on getting my forefinger painted with black ink. I had to head out of town for the wedding of my niece and, while I knew which event was more important to me and mine, I still had a twinge of regret at not being able to participate in that election. Read more

Recently I ran into a friend of union minister for science and technology Vilasrao Deshmukh who told me the latter had been quite incensed with his recent cabinet colleague Gurudas Kamat. Read more

If dereserving a plot meant for weaker sections of society in Karnataka and handing it over to your son is not illegal, just immoral, then, pray, why is the new Maharashtra government and the whole world going for former Chief Minister Ashok Chavan’s blood and that of his bureaucrats for assigning to themselves and various assorted members of their families prime flats in the Adarsh housing society in Bombay? Read more

My friend Avinash Pande, a secretary with the All India Congress Committee, was a worried man, Wednesday night. Read more

Bal Thackeray was jailed for a few days in the 1960s when Morarji Desai took on the Shiv Sena for its disruptive ways – the party had just been launched in Maharashtra and the Sena’s first protest, of course, was to join up the movement to integrate the Marathi-speaking Belgaum in Karnataka with the rest of Maharashtra. Read more

After deliberating a lot about whether I should spend my vacation travelling round Rajasthan or Karnataka (my friends have gone to Cambodia and Jordan, among other places), I decided I would head home to Mother and stay put with her after a busy year that did not allow me to drop anchor in Nagpur for too long, through two elections (Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly) this year. Read more

Many, many moons ago, I had been to Hubli in Karnataka on a school exchange programme. I did not remember much from those times but the little that I did were memories of a small, quaint, old- fashioned traditional South Indian provincial town. Read more