In a week full of scams and scandals and exposes all over the country, just some random thoughts about my overview of the state of the nation – or rather its leaders. Read more

Back in those days when I was at college and Subramanian Swamy was a Havard-returned guest lecturer at our university, I remember one of our professors of political science watch the man grimly as he spoke more on economics than on politics. 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

In the 1980s, Chhagan Bhujbal, the then Shiv Sena’s lone MLA in Maharashtra, coined a famous term that has stuck in the minds of many people of that time: ‘bhukhandache Shirkhand’. In other words, he was accusing then chief minister Sharad Pawar of licking up a lot of land (more than 200 plots in Bombay, in fact) that had been de-reserved by him for unknown reasons. Read more

I was amused to see Team Anna draw flak this week from two leaders quite on the opposite sides of the spectrum: Sonia Gandhi and Nitish Kumar. While Sonia, whose speech was read out in absentia at a rally in Uttarakhand, seemed quite impatient with the frequent noises being made by the team members, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar was simply – and justifiably – peeved at the tendency of the team members to think only they are right and everybody else who has his or her own mind is corrupt. Read more

I have rarely heard a wittier line from a Congressman. 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

Mayawati had Kanshiram, Sheila Dixit had her father-in-law Umashankar Dixit, J Jayalalithaa had M G Ramachandran, Uma Bharti first had the patronage of Rajmata Vijay raje Scindia and later of L K Advani who she acknowledged as pita-tulya (akin to a father) and, of course, her brother standing beside her through thick and thin. Read more

Minutes after senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L K Advani had apologised to Sonia Gandhi for falsely accusing her and her family of having Swiss bank accounts of their own, Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, had tweeted Read more

Sonia Gandhi’s first ever full-blown political rally was in Maharashtra – in the tribal district of Nandurbar. Sharad Pawar was astonished at the numbers the adivasis turned up in to hear Mrs Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law. Read more