BOOKWATCH
Death: life's only guarantee
Death: life's only guarantee
THE first thing that catches the eye in Death at My Doorstep is that the noted columnist Khushwant Singh should even consider having an epitaph for himself. One would have thought that the man who paid little attention to such niceties for much of his life would want no one fussing over such matters after his death. This slight aberration apart, Singh does not disappoint even in the death that he awaits with resignation. In his epitaph, he has turned his "malice to one and all" onto himself:
Here lies one who spared neither man nor God
Waste not your tears on him, he was a sod
Writing nasty things he regarded as great fun
Thank the Lord he is dead, this son of a gun.
Probably it is his desire to ensure that platitudes are not showered on him as is wont with most obituaries that has made Singh pen his epitaph. After all, he is not among those who subscribe to the view that nothing bad should be said about the dead. And, some of the obituaries he has written over the years — that have been put together in this Roli publication — bear testimony to his claim.
Split into two parts, the first, Death and Dying, reflects Singh's and some other views on the subject, and includes an account of how he dealt with the death of his wife a few years back. The section After Life is an assortment of obituaries he has written and bear out his irreverence towards death — the only certainty of life.
Though they reflect his own biases like the obituary on Sanjay Gandhi, the writer does not mince words while writing about M.O. Mathai, special secretary to Jawaharlal Nehru for 12 of his years as Prime Minister. While Mathai — who, according to Singh, "wormed his way" into the inner-most circle of power from a clerical post — earned the title "Nehru's Nemesis", Mountbatten has been knighted by him as the "Lord of Baloney".
Death at My Doorstep, Khushwant Singh, Roli, Rs. 295.
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From construction to pharma
FOR industrialist Bhai Mohan Singh, January 2005 will surely be a milestone month of his twilight years. For, the spotlight fell on him in full beam; not once but twice. First came Bhupesh Bhandari's book The Ranbaxy Story: The Rise of an Indian Multinational and then the coveted Padma Vibhushan.
While Bhandari tracks the family from its roots in undivided India, the book essentially spans Bhai Mohan Singh's life; beginning in the construction business (winning prized contracts and amassing huge amounts of wealth, enough to be regarded as one of the wealthiest Punjabi families in early 1940s), setting up a finance company which eventually brought him in touch with a small pharmaceutical agency called Ranbaxy & Co. Ltd., to remaining the father figure overseeing its journey through the years.
Tracing Ranbaxy's journey from a distributor of medicine to a multinational corporation deriving over 80 per cent of its business from outside India, Bhandari highlights how the sleeping pill Calmpose catapulted what was till 1969 a "somnolent company" on to the "long road to global stardom" that has had its fair share of ups and downs.
The Ranbaxy Story: The Rise of an Indian Multinational, Bhupesh Bhandari Viking, Rs. 450.
* * *
`Casual print autopsy?'
AMAR SINGH, Pramod Mahajan, J. Jayalalithaa, Arun Shourie, Samir Jain... each draws strong reactions. No wonder, ImprintOne opted to title its "unvarnished" portraits of these five prominent Indians and more Love Them Loathe Them. To add to the punch, the publishers got the man who writes "With Malice to One and All", Khushwant Singh, to pen the foreword when he himself could have made it to the pack featured in this second offering from the fledgling publishing house.
When has the mention of Amar Singh or Pramod Mahajan drawn a lukewarm response? Or for that matter Samir Jain, who many in the Fourth Estate hold responsible for changing the face of Indian journalism. Part of the Page Three circuit, most of those profiled in the book have courted controversies, run into more than a spot of trouble, and emerged almost phoenix-like with an even larger persona. And, even when out of sight, they are seldom out of mind.
Two profiles that stand out in this collection of eight unvarnished portraits and a write-up on the clutch of "New Young Things" aiming at stardom in Bollywood are Prasun Sonwalkar's "Samir Jain: A Murdoch in Dhoti" and S. Sivadas' "Arun Shourie: World Bank to Hindutva". To be fair to the others, it must be said that these two writers had a ringside view of the individuals under the scanner; having worked in the publications they "managed".
Love Them Loathe Them, edited by Namita Gokhale, ImprintOne, Rs. 150.
ANITA JOSHUA
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