Most people in US are familiar with "where were you when Kennedy was shot", and world over more so about when Diana had a crash leading to her death. This book is somewhat like that for those that were living in or concerned with India through the years '75 - '91, through many many such moments - declaration of Emergency, lifting of Emergency, Indira Gandhi losing the election, ascendancy of Sanjay Gandhi and his death, Rajiv Gandhi taking over as his mother's helper and as prime minister post his mother's assasination, and more.
From Emergency years to Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, Tavleen Singh traces the years and the people, the Nehru-Gandhi family and the coterie in Delhi, and her own life entwined with it all. A journalist by profession, she was also a part of the elite set of the capital of India, and so had a particular insight that comes from familiarity. But more importantly the insight is due to her early realisation of being a part of a set that was foreign in their own land, and this understanding has led to her comprehension of issues of Indian politics and of the people involved.
Durbar or darbaar (spellings in Roman script are not important in Indian words because Indian scripts match letters to sound far more scientifically, and so a correct pronunciation is important, which matches a unique spelling in an Indian script - something English language and Roman script lack) is literally court, as in court of a monarch, and the Nehru-Gandhi (not related to Mahatma Gandhi but to Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter who married Feroze Gandhi, not related to Mahatma Gandhi) family turned into a dynasty through the years described here.
Through the process of the party workers always choosing someone from the family to lead, the obsequies behaviour of the bureaucracy towards them and the immense lead they mostly - though not always - had in elections over others, the family that might have been a part of a decent set of politicians turned into a dynasty of rulers surrounded by sycophants that never would disagree with them, and were thrown out if they did. Which led more than once to their downfall in elections, but the opposition has generally not been strong or consolidated, and this worked in favour of Congress returning to power again, with hardly a decade or less of other parties in rule since independence.
Tavleen Singh describes the elite western oriented set that met in drawing rooms of one or other of the set, the meetings with Rajiv and Sonia and their friends, their lack of inclination towards politics in spite of living in the house of the Prime Minister his mother as per Indian joint family norm, and her encounters and experiences with the realities of India that are far from this elite drawing room set.
To anyone that lived through those years this is a deja vu, yet it provides much fresh insight into various issues through the years - unless one was there with her and knew it all, of course. What is far more likely is that this leads to a perspective due to one's own experience being different.
