Author: Khushwant Singh
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 423
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143029576
Description
Now issued in paperback edition, this book is a personal memoir of Khushwant Singh, India's most widely read and controversial writer.
Born in 1915 in pre-Partition Punjab, Khushwant Singh, perhaps India’s most widely read and controversial writer, has been witness to all the major events in Modern Indian history - from Independence and Partition to the Emergency and Operation Blue Star – and has known many of the figures who have shaped it. With clarity and candor, he writes of leaders like Nehru and Indira Gandhi, the terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the talented and scandalous painter Amrita Shergil, and everyday people who became butchers during Partition.
Writing of his own life, too, he remains unflinchingly forthright. He records his professional triumphs and failures as a lawyer, journalist, writer and Member of Parliament; the comforts and disappointments in his marriage of over sixty years; his first, awkward sexual encounter; his phobia of ghosts and his fascination with death; the friends who betrayed him, and also those whom he failed.
REVIEWS
A blunt and honest account…laced with a little peg of malice and single malt.
-Business India
Khushwant on Khuswant is...irresistible…such is his skill as a writer – simple, lucid, unpretentious – that oft-known episodes are given a new lease of life…this book has been well worth the wait.
-India Today
Truth, Love & a Little Malice (has) much that is new and exciting and memorable…written with frankness and honesty.
-Book Review
Singh’s reminiscences about the famous men and women he has known make for thrilling voyeuristic reading. He has a way of observing other people and telling a story that is almost unmatched.
-Times of India
Contents
Prologue
Village in the Desert
Infancy to Adolescence: School Years
College Years in Delhi and Lahore
Discovering England
Lahore, Partition and Independence
With Menon in London, with Malik in Canada
Purging the Past and Return to India
Parisian Interlude
Discovery of India
Sikh Religion and History
Bombay, The Illustrated Weekly of India, 1969-79 and the Aftermath
With the Gandhis and the Anands
1980-86, Parliament and The Hindustan times
Pakistan
Oddballs and Screwballs
Wrestling with the Almighty
On Writing and Writers
The Last but One Chapter
Postscript: November 2001