Surprisingly for an author who was not only funded by various universities and other prestigious institutions of US, UK and India, and edited several books and several periodicals, this autobiography has inexplicable typos or spelling mistakes of trivial sort - and very noticeably so.
If one is put off by copious references and more copious descriptions of nether equipment of various characters including the author, and lacks the patience and determination to go past it to see why this person was so famous and had such status, this book is not what one ought to take up.
At that it is uncertain if one should even if one does possess the virtues needed to go through it - rewards are very few, say one reference to a charmed moonlit night with nightingale, and another to magnolias (which he does not seem to have noticed blossom in Europe too, and in India in cooler places, albeit another variety - golden from cream to gold-saffron shades, in relatively less cool places too).
Other than this, one repents having read it, especially if one is not interested in gossip and malice and huge egomania of the author, especially when it is against good people, or when he seems not to notice he is criticising those that share his most severe faults. For instance he complains about a fellow author who was more interested in precisely what he himself describes copiously, rather than blossoming fields of saffron or other beauties of India he was shown - and fails to notice the irony of the complaint (or was that a deliberate devilish act, complaining against someone else who does it, just so one says "oh, but you know, you are doing it too" and he has his laughter about how naughty he has been both ways?).
What happened when I proceeded to begin this review was almost surrealistically as if KGB knew I was going to write negatively about a small tool of their infamous boss, and proceeded to undo various settings for security of my pc - sites inviting me to buy horrendous unwanted stuff would not go away, and advertisements pretending to be chat sites where supposedly young attractive blond females kept plaguing the pages of shelfari and reappearing. When I managed to remove it all, my computer informed me they had changed the dangerous settings I had installed, and the filth reappeared. It was almost a premonition about this book, except it was after reading it and before being able to begin writing this review.
It is unlikely this guy was a tool of stalin, but you never know, after all there would not be a label to the effect would there, except he was more likely working for the other side, what with his various prestigious assignments from US mentioned extensively here - from Rockefeller foundation funding his writing about history of his people (which he assures us is the only reason he maintained his hair and dressing style for, not religion but communal identification), to teaching at various universities including Princeton. All this would point at his being a great mind and a scholar, if not for reading this book or other pieces elsewhere, where such a calibre is notable by its absence. And if he wished to hide it for sake of appearing a buffoon only so his hidden career would go unnoticed, then the various prestigious scholarly assignments and copious funding thereof by various institutions of the world is completely baffling.
The author is a product of what might transpire if the much maligned caste systems of India or even England and Europe generally - although the latter two are different from that of India, and were practised in colonies very differently when it came to local people - are demolished with no other system to take their place. The author was born into a family that was placed by sheer luck in way of destiny, in that his father was one of the builders given contract to build New Delhi, built a major part of it (and his own palatial homes in centre of the new city, with "leftover" material and labour), was knighted for the trouble apart from the wealth made on this project, and thus the family was in high circles of politics and hoi polloi of the city and the nation, with contacts that were therefore not merely local or national but international, and various prestigious assignments one after another as he himself went on giving up job after job deciding it did not suit him, having proved no merit for either the next assignment or the past one, and definitely not of the level he kept on getting more and more of.
This basically is society as it gets if all old caste systems with breeding and training in family and society is done away with - money buys everything through social contacts if not directly, while poor with real and far superior talent go begging.
Various refugees and migrants of various lands one has known over decades share this, with one another largely and specifically with this author, that they hate having had to leave for survival, they grieve and mourn those that they left, they attempt to befriend then over life just so they themselves are not guilty of having left for just reason, and they turn their grief and pain of separation into a subtle or open tool of disdain and derision against precisely the land, the nation that gave them a life, a refuge, honour and more.
This author is honest in admitting and declaring how unfriendly the people of the homeland he was separated from were, but he is not merely attempting to befriend them lifelong, he is forever denying the nation they created is doing anything wrong, even when it is all too obvious; and he disdains and more, generally and specifically, the people who made his final homeland possible at all. It is as if the freedom, the possibility of learning and achieving a social status, is all merely his due, as is destroying all sorts of people who were on the whole beyond good, while befriending dictators and worse of his earlier home.
And having done his worst in all of this he proceeds to complain about the visitor who notices filth more than beauty shown him by the author.
Why does one read this, one might ask. Apart from a wish not to be put off by his deliberate filth in the first few pages, one might wish to know more about the history of the nation told in an intimate view - his father built New Delhi, he lived amongst the hoi polloi of the land and knew people of wealth and power in Delhi over the lifetime of his long life - and one might have read another, far more interesting and better written account by another, younger, author. The aims of reading if limited to this fail, however. He is there to expose anyone of quality with a view of their backside exposed so to speak figuratively, as long as they are of majority of India. Or anything respected by the said majority.
For example he congratulates himself about having saved Penguin India by pointing at an extremely offensive part of Ginsberg's book describing all Goddesses of India as prostitutes, final result being the book was published in India without the said offensive part but elsewhere with it, with no protest from either India or majority of India, but he stands by ban on Salman Rushdie in India, with no comment in that context about freedom of speech or authors.
One wonders if the hypocrisy is deliberately exposed by him here, just to see if he could set fire to majority of India by informing them of Ginsberg's offensive remarks, or if he wished to see if they read him at all and reacted if they did. Wonder if it was a disappointment, in that so far there seems to have been no protest against Ginsberg in India.
If one does not read this, one has lost very little.
