Here’s Someone I’d Like you to Meet: Tales of Innocents, Musicians and Bureaucrats

Sheila Dhar (1929-2001) studied at Hindu College, Delhi, and obtained her M.A. in English (with the highest distinction: summa cum laude) from Boston University. Though she wrote essays and stories with a skill possessed only by the rarest of reconteurs, the passion of her life was Hindustani classical music, which she performed, studied, and wrote about with profound insight and an uncommon wit. She served on the board of the Sangeet Natak Akademi and was advisor for music to the Indian Council of Cultural Relations. Married to the economist P.N. Dhar (who was for many years Indira Gandhi's closest advisor), she also had occasion to observe the workings of India's bureaucracy and political elites. She turned her pen on them with equal facility, summing up the pomposity and stupidity of babudom through incomparable real-life stories that are unlike anything written in modern Indian English. Sheila Dhar's books include Children's History of India (1961); This India (1973); and Here's Someone I'd Like You to Meet (1995)