Author: Khushwant Singh
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 423
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0670049166
Description
Uncompromising, comic, often moving and always hugely readable, this is a memoir worthy of one of the great icons of our time.
Khushwant Singh has always been worth listening to. In a career spanning over five decades as writer, journalist and editor, his views have been provocative and controversial, but they have also been profound, deeply perceptive and always compelling. Above all, despite his eminence and popularity, Khushwant Singh has never been less than honest and, most importantly, has never talked down to his readers. His autobiography is of a piece with his life and work.
Born in 1915 in pre-Partition Punjab, Khushwant Singh has been witness to most of 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. He writes of leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, the terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the talented and scandalous painter Amrita Shergil, and everyday people who became butchers during Partition, with the clarity and candor expected of him.
Writing of his own life, too, Khushwant Singh 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.
Uncompromising, comic, often moving and always hugely readable, Truth, Love and a Little Malice is a memoir worthy of one of the great icons of our time.
Publisher's NOTE:
This volume was to have been published in January 1996, but for reasons briefly explained in the postscript, that did not come to pass. Apart from the postscript, which the author added in November 2001, the text of 'Truth, Love and a Little Malice: An Autobiography' remains substantially as it was when originally completed in 1995.
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
Postcript: November 2001