I have written about this some years ago but it bears repeating.

Nearly 15 years ago when the Hansie Cronje scandal had hit the headlines round the cricketing world, a top ranking police officer had told me there were only two honest men in the Indian cricketing team — Rahul Dravid and Saurav Ganguly. Read more

As I was growing up, I had acquired a friend who had desperately wanted to be a spy. Brought up seeing James Bond films and reading John Le Carre books, he had believed he could do much for the country and serve the people well as an intelligence officer in one of the various agencies in India. Read more

The first time I met Sonia Gandhi was soon after she became Congress president – at a dinner at Nasik hosted by Sharad Pawar who was then sill part of the Congress. The party had swept more than 40 of the 48 seats to the Lok Sabha from Maharashtra and Pawar had just been made leader of the opposition. Read more

Last week I heard with interest Rahul Gandhi, as the newly appointed vice president of his party, call for the identification of 40 to 50 people in the Congress in each state who could be leaders -potential chief ministers and prime ministers. Read more

Mahatma Gandhi was an apostle of peace. Narendra Modi, clearly, is not. But he is nobody’s fool. So when Anil Ambani compares the Gujarat chief minister to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, I do not think even Modi believes a single word of what he says. Read more

Some years ago then RSS chief the late K Sudershan had come up with a unique plan to combat the presumed mushrooming population of Muslims in India. Contrary to all anthropological data in the country he thought all Muslims had four wives when the fact was that it was more Hindu and Jain businessmen, rather than the comparatively poor Muslims, who had the means to afford second and third establishments had married more than once. Read more

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

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

I wonder what it is about male politicians, in India and elsewhere, that they just cannot be chivalrous about women, justifying the famous adage `male chauvinist pigs’ coined for their sex years ago at a particular international womens’ conference. Read more