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

President Pratibha Patil was always a Indira Gandhi loyalist. But, as far as I know (she was a family friend of a dear aunt’s), contrary to what Rajasthan ex-minister Amin Khan said recently, she never either cooked for Mrs Gandhi or washed dishes in her kitchen. Read more

At a time when television news was just coming of age in India (the mid-Nineties), I recall I was in Delhi when the then Congress president Sitaram Kesri had pulled support from the Deve Gowda government. Read more

I can hardly believe that it is two decades since the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.

Just a few days before he was killed he was campaigning in Bombay. I was working for a wire service at the time and my Bureau Chief had given me stern instructions: the then union government had withdrawn his security cover and Rajiv was a sitting duck for assassins. Read more

Some years ago, when I did not know Suresh Kalmadi at all but was invited to a party he was throwing at a five-star hotel in Bombay, I was not too sure if I would make it – or if I would be comfortable in case I did.

But then I decided to attend, for it would have been churlish to refuse. I went on my own, however, – rather tentatively, without an ‘accompaniment’ as some would say — for I could not but help remember the two occasions when I invited someone to similar parties by politicians and shuddered at what had transpired. Read more