Reporting On Years
The next big book to make news is slated to be veteran journalist Kuldeep Nayar’s memoirs, Beyond The Lines, that HarperCollins will be bringing out soon. Nayar, going on 89, has had an inside track to all our PMs since Independence, except perhaps the present one. He was press advisor to Lal Bahadur Shastri and was in Tashkent when he passed away. He was jailed during the Emergency and published In Jail the next year. Nayar has written a dozen books, but the memoir promises to be the tell-all one. In fact, he had so much to say that the original manuscript ran into over 900 pages. The editors at HarperCollins have trimmed it to a more manageable 400-odd pages.
Prompt Salutation
The quintessential American trend of a news story breaking on a Friday and someone delivering a book about it on Monday seems to be catching up here too. So even as Gen V.K. Singh is still breaking news, Lt Col Arun Jha has fired General Salute (Manas Publication), where the author attacks the army chief at least on 15 counts for his various ‘misdeeds’. Is there a book round the corner in support of the chief?
Aviator In Shades
There is talk of another book of a man who is in the news. A biography of liquor baron and aviation pauper, Vijay Mallya, is in the works. A senior journalist is penning the life of our own Richard Branson, but it’s not clear if it will be an authorised biography or not. In any case, it might help to wait to a bit to see if the book should be about the rise of the king of good times or the fall of the aviator.
