As Bal Thackeray’s birth anniversary approaches (January 23), I wonder where the Shiv Sena supremo’s legacy has disappeared barely two months after his passing (on Nov 17, 2012). 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

When Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan accused his Bihar counterpart, Nitish Kumar, of playing cheap political games, he was not far wrong. 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

Soon after the introduction of mobile technology in the country, my then editor at the Indian Express had decided we needed to do a light-hearted story on how cell phones were changing the lives of politicians. Among the many leaders from across various political parties who I spoke to, the only one who could not respond, well, on the move, was Raj Thackeray, then of the Shiv Sena, now the president of the breakaway Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. Read more

Some years ago, there was a Congress minister in Maharashtra, destined for greater heights nationally, who was caught out with a famous Bollywood actress in a hotel room in Bombay. Read more

It has taken ten long years, but Narendra Modi finally gets his comeuppance. And I am glad it comes out of the Gujarat high court rather than through cases shifted out of his home state which lends the judgment on the Lokayukta rather more credibility than it would otherwise have had. Read more

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Socialist. Read more

With my regular driver on leave, I decided not to hire another one — I thought it would give me the much-needed opportunity to re-familiarise myself with the public transport system of Bombay that brings with it its own insights as well as sights and sounds that the rolled-up windows of your own car completely shut out of your life. Read more

Long ago, at college in Nagpur, I had a friend -very smart, very stylish, very attractive and, of course, very brave. It was from her that I learnt never to have any holy cows in life but at that age I thought she carried both her profanity and irreverence towards people, situations and also social mores a bit too far. Read more