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

In 1995, when the Congress was pushed below the majority mark in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly and the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance was struggling to cop up one of their own, Sharad Pawar, the sitting chief minister, well, just sat back and did nothing. Read more

The Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena like to believe that the Mangeshkar sisters belong to them. In fact, not just belong to them – the Thackerays believe that they own these national assets. 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

It has to be a significant moment in Indian history that, for the first time in the nearly five decades of the Shiv Sena’s existence, Bal Thackeray has been so publicly endorsed by the Congress as one of its own. Read more

In the eyes of most people, it is opportunity that makes the thief – you leave your diamonds lying on your dining table every morning and one day your otherwise honest maid might be tempted to pinch just that teeniest-weeniest bit of trinket she thinks you might not miss. Read more

For all those people who might think Narendra Modi is made of the stuff of great things, actually he is proving to be so much of a very small man. 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

A friend posted a query on my Facebook account a couple of days ago: what deal did the Shiv Sena offer the BJP to agree not to press for the post of Mayor of Bombay? Read more