Varsha Bhosle, political columnist and one-time star of Rediff’s online news portal has suddenly resurfaced in the news, after almost 5 years of a self-imposed hiding of sorts. For those who no longer remember, Varsha Bhosle, once compared to Ann Coulter for her right wing, somewhat breathless hyperbole and sarcastic style was an extremely popular pioneer of the online opinion column in India, and wrote on Rediff News from sometime in the late 1990s till upto 2003.
Like everyone else, I was hooked! Ms. Bhosle managed to capture middle class indignation at imagined issues and transform one’s sense of impotence into a kind of furious anger that reflected in her writings. Her enemies were the usual culprits—the ‘pseudo-secularists,’ the left wingers, Muslims and the occasional Orientalist. But unlike the rest of the rabid right wing- who were uncouth, sounded uneducated and let their biases show here was a more palatable, sophisticated, online ideologue who said what she thought and made it seem so innocuous.
Varsha Bhosle, suddenly stopped writing for Rediff News at the peak of her popularity around 2003, just as the market for online political commentary started widening. She claimed she was taken off by Rediff under pressure from ‘secularists’ for being ‘inflammatory.’ during the Gujarat riots. I would've said that her writings were much more than just inflammatory, they were downright violently polemical and catered to a kind of NRI Hindu with very little connect with reality but that never stopped Rediff before....
Since then except for a bizarre news story that surfaced around 2008, alleging a suicide attempt gone wrong she remained unheard off, until a story earlier this week in the Mumbai Mirror, about Varsha Bhosle, Asha Bhosle's daughter and chairman of a Pedder Road Housing Society, Prabhu Kunj and her dispute with the residents of the housing society.
The story isn't much-- a minor dispute about parking rights but its interesting to know what Varsha Bhosle is upto. If only we know why she stopped writing altogether....
