Although I had been 17 years in the foreign service before I really met Natwar Singh, it was only when I was serving as consul-general in Karachi and he was posted in May 1980 as my boss-ambassador in Islamabad that I got to know him. He had acquired a wholly undeserved reputation for haughtiness and pomposity. So, not a little nervous, I rang a colleague and friend of long standing, Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, who had served under Natwar in London through the Emergency (which was when he gained a nationwide reputation as Indira Gandhi’s hatchet-man). Shekhar assured me that, contrary to his reputation, Natwar was really a hail-fellow-well-met kind of chap, but for one thing—publicity and press coverage, which he wished to monopolise. I replied that in the eighteen months I had already served in Karachi, every move of mine was covered by the press and nary a photo-opportunity missed. Shekhar laughed and said that was alright, Natwar wouldn’t mind, provided I did not get any exposure in the Indian press. That had to be Natwar’s prerogative. As things turned out, Natwar revelled in my Karachi press coverage and when, towards the end of my tour of duty, India Today posted a very flattering tribute to my performance in Karachi, it was Natwar himself who was the first to point it out to me, with, I might add, considerable pride and even ownership. Of course, I had by then become a favourite of his, not because he endorsed my benign view of Pakistan, but because he was democratic enough to give a junior colleague his head. (Some time later, Natwar was to earn a permanent place in any Indian Book of Quotations by his famous put-down of an uppity journalist who asked whether on Pakistan he was a ‘dove’ or a ‘hawk’. Natwar snapped at him, “We are running foreign policy here, not an aviary!”)