What does Mrs G have to do with this?

Did Tandon’s diaries, written in Hindi, lose something in translation? One doesn’t know. The English version frequently has the same power to grip you as a government memo on office supplies. So, if you are doing a PhD on the Emergency, Tandon can perhaps save you some archival digging. But if you are reading him as a politically conscious general reader or as a relative stranger to modern Indian politics, you will die in the details.

Nothing comes alive, not even the fascinating transformation in Indira Gandhi’s personality and style of functioning, because the diarist records everything. Tandon’s discomfort and occasional outrage — at the plans to control government ads to the press, for example — do not put a perspective on what he saw.

When power corrodes, it does a very thorough job. An observer needs a sense of the grand and a sense of the absurd to begin to understand how cloistered rulers think. Tandon, if I can be forgiven an adjective a career bureaucrat will never use, is hopeless at that job.

The first volume at least had the merit of being some sort of a pioneer — no one had written an insider’s account of the Emergency. Even then, it was hard going. Minus the novelty, minus any deliciously disgusting revelation about anyone important, the second volume is 400 pages of tedium.

May be 100 pages fewer would have made it a little more bearable. What is the point of including entries like these: “22 November 1975. Nothing in particular happened today. I was in office the whole day. I wanted to visit the ministry of home affairs for some personal work but I could not step out.”

Days like that happen to all of us all the time. But we don’t write books about them.