Vintage Sardar

Khushwant Singh

Description

Khushwant Singh Has Spent A Lifetime Waging War Against Hypocrisy, Humbug And Intolerance. It Has Made Him india's Most Provocative And Popular Columnist. This New Collection Brings Together His Essays And Articles On Themes As Varied As God, The Afterlife, The Banning Of Books, Caste, Prostitution, Crank Calls And Pets. His Skills As A Raconteur And Journalist Are Used To Brilliant Effect In His Sketches Of Gandhi, Raj Kapoor, Vajpayee, Phoolan Devi, Zia-ul-haq And The Dalai Lama, As Also In His Travel Pieces On Nagaland And France, Among Other Places. The Vintage Sardar Ends With A Frank And Introspective Autobiographical Piece.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• Idioma inglés
• English
• India
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 09 avril 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184750775
• Langue: English

Extrait

‘I will prove, if I must, that the pen is still mightier thanthe sword, a Kalashnikov or a self-loading rifle.’
—Khushwant Singh
 
Khushwant Singh has spent a lifetime waging a waragainst hypocrisy, humbug and intolerance. It has madehim India’s most provocative and popular columnist. Thisnew collection brings together his essays and articles onthemes as varied as God, the afterlife, the banning ofbooks, caste, prostitution, crank calls and pets. His skillsas a raconteur and journalist are used to brilliant effect inhis sketches of Gandhi, Raj Kapoor, Vajpayee, PhoolanDevi, Zia-ul-Haq and the Dalai Lama, as also in his travelpieces on Nagaland and France, among other places. TheVintage Sardar ends with a frank and introspectiveautobiographical piece.
 
 
Khushwant Singh’s distinctive candour, wit and insightmakes this an engaging and sparkling collection.
 
Cover illustration by Saurabh Singh


PENGUIN BOOKS
THE VINTAGE SARDAR
 
Khushwant Singh was born in 1915 in Hadali, Punjab. He was educated at Government College, Lahore and at King’s College and the Inner Temple in London. He practised at the Lahore High Court for several years before joining the Indian Ministry of External Affairs in 1947. He began a distinguished career as a journalist with All India Radio in 1951. Since then he has been founder-editor of Yojna (1951-1953), editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India (1979-1980), chief editor of New Delhi (1979-1980), and editor of the Hindustan Times (1980-1983). Today he is India’s best-known columnist and journalist.
 
Khushwant Singh has also had an extremely successful career as a writer. Among the works he has published are a classic two-volume history of the Sikhs, several novels (the best known of which are Delhi , Train to Pakistan and The Company of Women ), and a number of translated works and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature and current affairs. His autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice was published in 2002.
 
Khushwant Singh was Member of Parliament from 1980-1986. Among other honours he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the President of India (he returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union Government’s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar).

THE VINTAGE SARDAR
 
 
 

The Very Best of Khushwant Singh


PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto M4P 2Y3
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Road. Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Group (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
 
First published by Penguin Books India 2002
 
Copyright © Naina Dayal 2002
 
All rights reserved
 
 
 
This Digital Edition published 2011. e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-077-5
Digital conversion prepared by DK Digital Media, India.
 
This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this e-book.
Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgements
The Writerly Life
Journalist bashing
A London-Glasgow diary: Authors, Poets etc.
Our Indo-Anglian mistress
Banning Rushdie
Polyglot poetry
Sir Penderel Moon
Honouring an editor
The Famous and the Infamous
Raj Thapar
The Prophecy
Shri 420
Akbar's love life
Zia-ul-Haq
The Edwina-Nehru affair
Phoolan Devi
Amrita Shergil
The one and only Nirad Babu
India's man of destiny
Death and the Afterlife
Pen versus the SLR 20
Old age and retirement
Life after death
Experience of death
The Dalai Lama on death
Fear of dying
Learning from the dead
The Question of Faith
Not in the name of Allah
The power of silence
Human face of God
Dialogue with the Dalai Lama: How life began
Dialogue with the Dalai Lama: Is there a God?
Dialogue with the Dalai Lama: Why bad things happen to good people
Why the fast of Ramazan?
God incarnate
Magic in the toe
Deepavali Gods and prayer
Neither Marx nor God
Let us clean our temples
Sati and Hindu-Sikh psyche
Sants and saints
Worship of the Ganga
Watching Nature
How it all began
Mango fool
Songs of the monsoon
Dog control
Burial more patriotic than cremation
Billo
Traveller's Tales
Monsoon in Hyderabad
Spanning Kaushalya
As others see us
Discovering the Assamese
Bhubaneshwar
Dateline Dhaka
The French connection
Nagaland on Christmas eve
A London-Glasgow diary: Rioting in London
The heart of India
Speaking of Sex
Kama to Rama
Heard of korophobia?
Author-MP and prostitute
Hand of the Potter
Living longer: Making love to the last
Stray Thoughts
Indo-Pak bhai-bhaism
Telephonic exchange of abuses
The bathing pool
The task of seeing oneself
To each his own grief



Acknowledgements
I would like to thank P.R. Krishna Narayanan of Cochin who sent me copies of most of the pieces included in this collection. It was his idea that these be put together and published under the title, The Vintage Sardar .
For granting permission to include articles that appeared in the columns ‘With Malice Towards One And All . . .’, Gossip Sweet and Sour’ and ‘. . . This Above All’, my thanks to Hindustan Times and ABP Limited.



 
The Writerly Life

Journalist bashing
‘Journalists are like dogs,’ writes Philip Howard of The Times (London): ‘When one barks, the whole pack takes up the howl, and for a week or two the world seems full of nothing but sentencing for rape, say. Then the subject becomes boring and the pack moves on.’
Howard is by no means alone in abusing journalists; there are many people who have as low an opinion of pressmen as he. Most of all those who have been bitten by them as politicians are regularly. Howard is also partly correct in his observation that when one journalist takes up an issue (‘barks’), others are quick to join him (‘take up the howl’). I can cite innumerable recent instances when one journalist broke a story which others took up and made it appear that nothing in the world mattered more than their obsessions at the time. There was the case of the blinding of prisoners in Bihar jails (broken by M.J. Akbar of Sunday and The Telegraph ); the matter of Abdul Rehman Antulay’s so-called charitable trusts (broken by Arun Shourie in The Indian Express ); the training of Khalistani terrorists and the peccadilloes of Orissa’s chief minister, J.B. Patnaik (exposed by Pritish Nandy in The Illustrated Weekly of India ); Pakistan’s claim to have developed nuclear weapons (exploded by Kuldip Nayar); the investigative reporting of topics of national interest done by teams of The Statesman ’s reporters. I could multiply such instances by the dozen, but have deliberately chosen the more spectacular ones because they did in fact bring about a change in the thinking of the entire country. Can similar claims be made by practitioners of any other profession?
 
*
 
I take up cudgels on behalf of my fraternity because journalist-bashing has become a favourite pastime of our politicians who are themselves as crooked as a dog’s hind legs. For them, any stick is good enough to beat a dog (journalist) with. But of all people, when politicians accuse journalists of corruption, it is enough to make a dog laugh. Every dog has his day; today it is the day of the politician: he is the top dog. It will not last very long and I hope he may soon find himself an underdog. People are beginning to realize that if politicians continue to make a mess of all our institutions as they already have of the legislature, the bureaucracy and the judiciary, the country will go to the dogs. The one institution that can stand up to them and engage in a dog fight unto death is the free press. The people must see to it that no one puts us in the dog house.
The Hindustan Times, 28 March 1987

A London-Glasgow diary: Authors, Poets etc.
I was included amongst the few Third World writers to be present on the 70th birthday of Edwin Morgan who is acknowledged as Scotland’s leading poet and the darling of Glaswegian intellectuals. I had not heard of him. The seminar entitled ‘Writing Together’ began with Morgan’s lecture and recitation of his poems. I was in the last row of the hall; I could not catch all of what he was saying both because of the distance and because of his strong Scottish accent. Evidently some things he said were witty, as some of the audience responded with laughter. At the end of his lecture there was thunderous applause.
I realized I was out of touch with modern trends. After the lecture I happily retired to a corner with my plate of cold salad and a glass of wine. I eyed the motley collection