Guts And Vainglory

Reading her colourful, often amusing, accounts of how she got to the frontlines of every flashpoint in South Asia during the last two decades, it’s easy to see why Pratap always got her story: the harder it gets, the more she tries, using everything she’s got, from feminine guile to disguise to flattery to sheer pig-headedness. Her "reporter’s hunch" is nothing but a compound of her willingness to watch, listen and be ready to leap at every chance, missing nothing en route, not the fact that her impoverished hostess went to bed hungry after feeding the last of the fish and rice gruel to her guests and family or that the local people hated the ipkf for stealing their goats and chickens.

Pratap leads into the accounts of her hair-raising professional experiences by contrasting it to her rather uneventful personal life—an early marriage, one child, divorce, single motherhood for 17 years ending in marriage to a Norwegian diplomat. As a contrast, there couldn’t be anything better: a giggly, fun-loving, insect-phobic young woman suddenly plunged into horrific situations. But as a memoir, readable and racy as it is, there is a disjointedness and artifice in this way of holding the story together.

Pratap suffers from one unfortunate habit in her private life. As her young son, Zubin, points out in the book: "The two things she loves most are travelling and lecturing." While Pratap never commits the sin of letting her views colour the stories of her professional life, she seems a little too ready to moralise in her private moments.

To write one’s memoirs at any age is an intimidating task: it goes against one’s grain to say anything uncomplimentary about oneself, and it goes against the reader’s grain to hear anything complimentary about the author. But to Pratap’s credit, what she lacks in years, she makes up in candour, faithfully recording her triumphs without succumbing to the equally natural desire to suppress the embarrassing moments. Like all of us, she has her share of them. But unlike most of us, she is ready to expose them for our entertainment.