Skip to main content

Goodbye, Khushwant Singh


To be able to live a whole century and relish that life to the fullest is a rare blessing.  Khushwant Singh (2 Feb 1915 – 20 March 2014) is one of those blessed souls.  It would be preposterous to wish his soul eternal rest since he had no such beliefs.  Agnostic Khushwant: There is no God! is the title of one of his many books.

He was a prolific writer.  A popular writer, I should say.  I don’t consider him a great writer although he could have been one, as evidenced by his novel, A Train to Pakistan. He was also a very knowledgeable person as revealed by some of his books on Sikhism particularly.  But he chose to write for the masses.  Probably, his acute awareness of the absurdity of human existence prompted him to do that.

What appeals to me about Khushwant Singh is his sheer forthrightness.  With malice towards one and all, as the title of one of his newspaper columns proclaimed tongue-in-cheek.  It was not malice at all, however; it was plain honesty, utter lack of hypocrisy.  He had no pretensions.  He spoke out what he believed was the truth.  He refused to put on masks. 

In some ways he was like the gargoyles erected on old, grand buildings.  The gargoyles saved the building from the ravaging effects of rainwater.  Khushwant Singh grinned or even snarled at us like the gargoyles.  But we knew there was the typically humorous, fun-loving Sardarji smiling away behind those grins and snarls.  We also knew that the Sardarji had much more to offer than his quirky grins and risqué jokes.


“Not forever does the bulbul sing
In balmy shades of bowers,
Not forever lasts the spring
Nor ever blossom the flowers.
Not forever reigneth joy,
Sets the sun on days of bliss,
Friendships not forever last,
They know not life, who know not this.”  [A Train to Pakistan]

Comments

  1. He is and always be a real gem.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A Train to Pakistan remains one of the most haunting books I've read.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Partition-generated violence remains one of the most painful events in our history...

      Delete
  3. Well ! if anything perfectly explains his work its the word "Paradoxical " - "He spoke out what he believed was the truth." I am not sure... he lived in interesting times and was interesting being ... RIP

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, Sachin, for Khushwant Singh a beautiful woman's smiling face would have been a greater truth than facts like water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen.

      Delete
  4. A great tribute!
    The news really shocked me, as incidentally I'm midway through his autobiography these days:(

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wish there were many like him, who would speak their mind and let the reader decide. We are not that lucky!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, indeed, Pattu... Most people want to ram their truths down our throats.

      Delete
  6. I have read a couple of his books and some of his columns. Loved that he lived life on his own terms. A fitting obituary.

    ReplyDelete
  7. He'll always be missed in fonts He wrote

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hi there,

    Indeed, you have summed it up quite nicely here. His honesty was what distinguished him from his peers. Maybe he did it consciously to demarcate his differentiation.
    Great post, keep it coming. And yes, RIP Khushwant Singh.

    Regards
    Jay
    My Blog

    ReplyDelete
  9. Well written Tribute to a legend.
    Noone can replace him for sure. Thanks for the post Sir.

    ReplyDelete
  10. very well written
    RIP khushwant singh.

    ReplyDelete
  11. A well rounded account of the great man who did not fear to express his true feelings & expose his earthy self.Thanks for posting

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...

Independence from Dictators too

Kerala Governor Rajendra Arlekar asked the state to observe ‘Partition Horror Day’ on 14 Aug instead of celebrating the country’s Independence. His organisation, the RSS, as well as its ideological sibling the Hindu Mahasabha, had explicitly directed its members not to celebrate the Independence on 14-15 Aug 1947. From Bombay Chronicle, 9 Aug 1947 Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins gave us a graphic description of what the RSS did on 15 Aug 1947, in their classic book Freedom at Midnight . When the rest of India celebrated its new Independence, the RSS hoisted its own flag, “an orange triangle, emblazoned upon which was the symbol that, in a slightly modified form, had terrorized Europe for a decade, the swastika.” About 500 RSS men stood saluting the swastika on 15 Aug 1947 in Poona. Lapierre and Collins describe the RSS as a “para-fascist movement” whose members “saw themselves as the heirs to those ancient Aryans.” Rajendra Arlekar is an RSS man. He has been doing whate...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...