REFLECTIONS ON THE WAY OF STORYTELLING

lai, Santha Rama Rau, Han Suyin, Amrit Rai, Nirad C Choudhary. They have all passed away. I am myself in my 94th year.

C RAJAGOPALACHARI’S

AUTOBIOGRAPHY he Art and Craft of writing

TAutobiographies and Biographies arrived in India in the first decade of 20th century.

DILIP HIRO BABAR

NAMA WROTE

Dilip Hiro in his Preface to Babar Nama, writes, “While numerous rulers in the world established dynasties, Zahir Uddin Babar has the distinction of being the only known founder of a leading dynasty who kept a journal.” Babar wrote in Turkish. His grandson, Akbar (1556-1605) had it translated into Persian.

The manuscript fortunately survived. Those of Kalidas did not. Kabir was, broadly speaking illiterate but most of his dohas and ‘poems’ survive. For centuries the oral preceded the written in India. Alas! Very few Indians have private libraries. I implored my IFS colleagues and friends to do so. All in vain.

Exceptions no doubt exist. That is not good enough.

The Indian Edition was published by Jaico. The 32nd in 2013. Nirad C Chaudhary died in Oxford in 1999 having been born in 1897. The third is S. Gopal’s biography of his father, DR S Radhakrishnan. Gopal was an eminent historian, educated at Oxford. For over a decade he was Director of the Historical Division in the Ministry of External Affairs. Gopal’s biography of his father was published in 1989, by University Press, Oxford. Paragraph one of chapter one is staggering

From my early teens I have been a voracious reader and buyer of books. Today I have a library of 6,000 books. Autobiographies and biographies fill many shelves.

NEHRU IN ONE OF HIS BOOKS...

Jawaharlal Nehru in one of his books wrote, “For me the absence of books would be greatest deprivation.” I could say the same about myself. Many of my literary friends were eminent authors. EM

Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, RK Narayan, Raja Rao, Ahmed Ali (Twighting Light in Delhi), Thakazi Sivesenkare Pil-

I got to know C Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) well. I kept pestering him to write his autobiography, but he did not agree. It would have in several ways a gem- What a life. Besides he wrote superb English, politically he was very near to Gandhiji and close colleagues of Sardar Patel, Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Abul Kalam Azad, Sarojini Naidu. It is a thousand pities that Sardar Patel did not write his autobiography.

GANDHIJI’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Gandhiji’s autobiography, “The Story of My Experiences with Truth”, came out in 1927. The original was in Gujrati. His secretary and close confident Mahadev Desai translated it into English. I do not have the exact figures, but the book sold in lakhs and was translated into many languages. I bought my copy in August 1945. In the last chapter, “farewell” he wrote, “The time has now come to bring these chapters to a close.

“My life from this point onward has been public that there is hardly anything about it that people do not know….In bidding farewell to the reader, for the time being at any rate, I ask him to join with me in prayer to the God of Truth that He grant me the boon of Ahimsa in mind, word and deed.”

“AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY”

BY NEHRU

In my judgement, between 1936 and 2023 three outstanding autobiographies, written in English are: “An Autobiography” by Jawaharlal Nehru,

The manuscript fortunately survived. Those of Kalidas did not. Kabir was, broadly speaking illiterate but most of his dohas and ‘poems’ survive. For centuries the oral preceded the written in India. Alas! Very few Indians have private libraries. I implored my IFS colleagues and friends to do so. All in vain. Exceptions no doubt exist. That is not good enough

For me the absence of books would be greatest deprivation. I could say the same about myself. Many of my literary friends were eminent authors. EM Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, RK Narayan, Raja Rao, Ahmed Ali (Twighting Light in Delhi), Thakazi Sivesenkare Pillai, Santha Rama Rau, Han Suyin, Amrit Rai, Nirad C Choudhary. They have all passed away. I am myself in my 94th year. NATWAR SINGH published in London in 1936. It is still selling. In the summer of 1912 Nehru was called to the Bar. In the early winter of the year he let for India “…….But now I returned for good, and I am afraid, as I landed in Bombay, I was a bit of a prig with little to command me.”

NIRAD C CHAUDHARY’S

WRITE UP

The next is Nirad C Chaudhary’s “The Autobiography of An Unknown Indian”, published in London in 1951. It created a sensation. Its dedication caused the author no end of trouble. It reads, “To the memory of the British Empire in India which conformed subjecthood on us but without citizenship; to which yet every one of us throughout the challenge. ‘Civics Britanicus Sum’, because all that was gone and living within us was made, shaped and quickened the same British Empire.”

The Indian Edition was published by Jaico. The 32nd in 2013. Nirad C Chaudhary died in Oxford in 1999 having been born in 1897. The third is S.

Gopal’s biography of his father, Dr S Radhakrishnan. Gopal was an eminent historian, educated at Oxford. For over a decade he was Director of the Historical Division in the Ministry of External Affairs.

GOPAL’S BIOGRAPHY OF HIS FATHER

Gopal’s biography of his father was published in 1989, by University Press, Oxford. Paragraph one of chapter one is staggering. “The future President of India was born on 20th September 1887. His parents, Sarvapalli Veeraswamy and Sitmma were a poor Brahmin couple. There is doubt if Veeraswamy was his father…..” Intellectual endowment and physical appearance both suggested that Radhakrishnan belonged to a different stock. Radhakrishnan himself accepted this version, and critical of his mother’s conduct, always, throughout her long life, kept her at a distance. But he was attached to the man who passed for his father.”

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL

TYPICAL MASS SHOOTERS ARE IN THEIR 20s AND 30s

The two men who shot dead 18 people in separate incidents just days apart in California are the latest perpetrators in America’s long history of mass gun violence. But something about these public shootings, and the men held responsible, stands out.

The median age of mass shooters in the United States is 32. Yet the man who is alleged to have shot dead 11 people in Monterey Park on Jan. 21, 2023, before turning the gun on himself was 72 years old – the oldest mass shooter in modern American history, our records show. Meanwhile, the gunman who took the lives of seven more in Half Moon Bay two days later was also older than most — 66, the third-oldest in history.

We are criminologists who built a database of 191 mass shooters using public data. The shooters in our records date back to 1966 and are coded on nearly 200 different variables, including age at the time of attack. Our research shows that mass shootings – defined here as events in which four or more people are killed in a public place with no underlying criminal activity – have become more frequent, and deadly, over time.

SOURCE: THE CONVERSATION

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. Bible

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MONI SHARMA

The writer is Editor (News) in First India, Jaipur expressed desire for exchange of technology between their defence industries.