From the small town of Sialkot in pre-partition Punjab, through the bustling streets of Delhi, to the scholarly environs of Cambridge and the bistros of Turin – Chaman Nahal walks us gently through his life. A life rich in literary scholarship and discipline, but equally in humour and a cynical eye capable of looking as critically at himself as at the follies and foibles of other human beings. If his ‘rules’ for subjects as varied as writing a full length book while coping with a fulltime job, fighting depression or even addiction to drink, bring a smile to one’s lips, his achievements as writer, teacher and litterateur, often in the face of great odds, can only induce respect. Nahal’s delightfully candid accounts of his encounters with Nirad Chaudhuri, the Great Sir Vidia, Manohar Malgonkar and others; his diatribes against the tardiness and indiscipline that marks so much of 21 century India; and his frank appraisal of the trials and tribulations he has faced as an Indian writer in English, both at home and abroad, make this a memoir significant in today’s literary context, as well as an absorbing cameo of an earlier time and place.
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