It says much about us, in the media, that not a single newspaper, television channel or news agency, had the faintest clue that the UPA 2 government was preparing to hang 26/11 terrorist Ajmal Kasab on November 21, five days before the fourth anniversary of the terror attack. 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

During his first term as chief minister of Maharashtra, I had once quizzed Vilasrao Deshmukh about the general feeling of critics that his was a lack-lustre government that was really incapable of doing anything significant for the people. Read more

When Sharad Pawar split the Congress in 1999, he had hoped that the whole of the party will rally behind him and that Sonia Gandhi will be just left with herself and a handful of her close supporters. 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

“Pull the cops off the streets of Bombay for just one day,” the late Pramod Navalkar, Shiv Sena leader, had once told me, “and see the mayhem that will overpower not just the city but Maharashtra and the entire country. Firm policing is why you and I can walk the streets fearlessly and sleep easy at night.” 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

Poor RR Patil. Apart from the fact that he has not been having a good week, what with the July 13 serial blasts in Bombay and chief minister Prithviraj Chavan pointing out that decisions regarding law and order are delayed, he is under attack from even his own party men. Read more

Some years ago, a friend from the UK needed to go to Dadar, the heart of the Maharashtrian locality of Bombay, for a meeting. I put her in a taxi and asked the cabbie to take her wherever she wanted and also bring her back home. Read more

When McDonald’s first launched in Bombay, I remember, some NGOs took several children from the slums to this chain of restaurants for a treat. When one child was asked to comment how he had felt eating his first McBurger, he said, “I think I love our own vada pav better!” Read more