The Thackerays—father, son and now nephew—have tried their damnedest to destroy much of what makes Bombay a great, unique city. They have failed. And Raj Thackeray’s puerile ploy will get him nowhere. As I write this, his cousin Uddhav has also got into the jobs-only-for-Maharashtrians act. He, too, will fail. The reality is that the city has changed radically in demographics. After Partition, mainly Sindhi and Punjabi refugees settled here. Since the 1990s, fewer Gujaratis and south Indians have made Bombay their home, though more bhaiyyas and Biharis have, simply because Gujarat and the south have been doing well economically, UP and Bihar not so. More significantly, employment of "locals" has gone up. There are fewer lumpen elements for the Thackerays to exploit. I recall in the 1960s, the then Maharashtra chief minister complaining to the editor of the Times of India, who was half-Japanese and half-Parsi, that there were no Maharashtrians in senior editorial positions. He was wrong. There was one, my colleague, A.S. Abraham, who had lived all his life in the city (as had his forefathers). But he was Jewish, hence presumably did not qualify. When the TOI finally got a Maharashtrian, Dilip Padgaonkar, and a semi-Maharashtrian, Rajdeep Sardesai (his father, Dilip Sardesai, was actually from Goa), as editor and city editor respectively, they preferred moving to Delhi, where they now reside!