Please do not praise Khushwant Singh too much — he never suffered flattery.
What a pity Khushwant Singh did not live to be a hundred. What a pity that we shall not see his reactions to the election results due in May. How would the man who bluntly told L.K. Advani that he had sown the dragon-seed of hate have reacted to the possible victory of Narendra Modi?
Khushwant Singh, who died yesterday aged 99, is being mourned as a great writer but more than that, this was really the passing of a powerful influencer. Former editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India and Hindustan Times, former member of the Rajya Sabha, a Padma Vibhushan awardee, fiction writer, translator and historian, he was most loved for his newspaper column “With Malice Towards One and All”, a daring mash-up of political opinion, gossip items and jokes from the grapevine. The jokes put readers at ease and made them receptive to the political content. It was an excellent subversive strategy.
It is impossible to think of a single personality who can step into the shoes of a man who wore so many hats. Indeed, that is mixing metaphors but in life, Khushwant Singh had always indicated his preference for mixed media over black and white. In our times, when opinion seems to have frozen into intractable, oppositional positions, when professional opinion-makers are dangerously sure of themselves, the sardar who poked fun at himself, trapped in a light bulb with a stack of books, a girlie magazine and a bottle of Scotch, will be sorely missed.
