“Yeh Tamil Nadu kaisa pochega, bhai?” (How do I reach Tamil Nadu, brother?) that a self-confessed attacker asked his target, comedian Kunal Kamra, with a curious mix of desperation and bravado, has to be an epic question of our time.

This came, as is widely known by now, from a Shiv Sena worker of the Eknath Shinde faction over a telephone call to Kamra after his parody song went viral. In it, without naming Shinde, Kamra called him a traitor.

What followed was typical Sena-style retribution – vandalising the venue and the hotel where he had recorded the show, threatening him with dire consequences using the same old set of cuss words and terror, filing an FIR against him, and chest-thumping themselves about the “strong action” they took against an insult to their boss.

The desperation to reach Kamra in Tamil Nadu and smack him in order to score a few brownie points with the boss while struggling to locate the place on India’s map would have been funny if it was not so appalling. It made me think: the more the Shiv Sena changes, the more it remains the same, and Mumbai loses.

The muscle-flexing caller should have known that Tamil Nadu was former Madras given the hate that was generated against ‘Madrasis’ by the late Sena chief Bal Thackeray in the 1960s. But that’s the story, isn’t it? The philosophy, the targets, the methods, and the foul language that Mr Thackeray had set out with in June 1966, when he and a dedicated group set up the Shiv Sena, continue to prevail nearly six decades later when the world operates in a different context. Mr Thackeray termed it thokshahi, translated as the rule by force, which was his pun on lokshahi or democracy. He was not a fan of........

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