![]() ![]() ![]() His office would be teeming with people till late in the night, unlike any other government office that shuts by evening,” said Vilas Joshi, a long-time associate of Shinde. “During his tenure as leader of house, there used to be a huge crowd outside his office to meet him and get issues resolved. People were soon flocking to Shinde’s office in the municipal body. However, Dighe gave him comfort and encouraged him to accept society as a whole as his family, anointing him as leader of house in the Thane civic corporation. The tragedy left him shattered, and he had nearly made up his mind to quit politics. In a freak mishap in 2000, Shinde lost his two young children to a drowning incident in his native village. This trust helped me do my best for him,” Shinde had once said. “Dighe saheb always used to assign me difficult jobs, and I used to take it as a challenge to execute them. He contested the Thane corporation election from the Wagle Estate ward for the first time in 1997 and won by a considerable margin. ![]() Shinde’s loyalty towards the party led Dighe to encourage him to join active politics. Shinde’s mentor and Sena leader from Thane, Anand Dighe, spotted the spark in him as he watched him execute every assignment with his daredevil approach. ![]() Here, Shinde was introduced to social service and politics and was inspired by Shiv Sena pramukh Balasaheb Thackeray, so he joined the Sena, said his brother Prakash, who was formerly a corporator in the Thane civic corporation. The jobs were all humble, and after Eknath’s marriage to Lata, the family continued to stay in a small settlement in the Kisan Nagar area of Thane. The father worked as a supervisor in a box factory in the 1980s, and Eknath, the eldest of four siblings - with brothers Subhash and Prakash and sister Sunita - had to take up work as soon as he had finished his schooling. Eknath’s father Sambhaji migrated to Thane when Shinde was still in school. Like most villages in Konkan and south Maharashtra, youngsters from this village migrate to Mumbai and Thane for work. The village from which the family hails, Dare Tarfe Taam, is a hamlet located 85 km from Satara town and is flanked by the Koyna river. New CM a staunch Sainik who almost gave up politics Eknath Shinde's anointment as chief minister is a spectacular rise for a hardcore Sainik who at one point almost gave up politics owing to a personal tragedy. But Shinde, who rose from a grassroots-level Shiv Sainik to a key Sena leader, has turned out not only to be the Sena's biggest rebel but the reward for his rebellion has also been big: at the age of 58, he has been anointed as chief minister. After his rebellion last week, the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena derisively referred to his background as a rickshaw-driver and taunted him, asking if BJP would give him the top job in the state. He drove autorickshaws and tempos and also worked in private firms. Born into a humble Maratha household from the sleepy village of Dare Tarfe Taam in Satara district in western Maharashtra, Eknath Shinde took up a variety of small-time jobs after his schooling from a local Thane school to support his parents and three siblings. ![]()
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