The Time of My Life: Memories, Anecdotes, Tall Talk

These are charming stories of a childhood in lahore, bustling with drunken shoemakers, friendly fruitsellers, bachelor uncles, Tayaji defeated by a rat and Chachaji hunting for a bride. But what, one wonders, is one of India’s most reputed artists doing writing stories that read like Paiji’s tales from a charpoy? Not a hint that the boy growing up at 2, Maclagan Road would abandon his comfortable bank job for Art, unless you consider a perfunctory line in the beginning about his "compulsive itch" to draw. True, the latter half of this slim volume, promisingly titled Adventures in Art, features artists like M.F. Husain, Satish Gujral, Akbar Padamsess and Ram Kumar. But it’s as if Khanna has trawled his impressive past-as member of the Progressive Artists Group, participant in world triennales and biennales, over 40 one-man shows and come up with trivia! That day in the 50s when Ram Kumar sold his first painting and his friends took him to York for a celebratory breakfast that cost him a month’s budget; the indecent proposal Akbar got after exhibiting his first nude; the misadventures in Paris and more.