Mush can’t get peace: Khushwant
IANS SUNDAY, APRIL 04, 2004 10:41:31 AM ]
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-600241,curpg-1.cms
NEW DELHI: He laughs when he is called a dirty old man. At 90, Khushwant Singh bears tags lightly. He also retains a scribe’s ability to give opinions the spice and sexiness of a good story.
When this interview began, Singh was watching cricket on television, perched on a large armchair, beside an empty fireplace in the sitting room of his Delhi home. “This is a game I never played, but do I enjoy watching it!” he asked rhetorically. "When India plays Pakistan, it is war.”
“Of course, everything we do with Pakistan is also politics,” he added, almost on reflex.
As respected across the border as he is in India, Singh, in his career as editor of Hindustan Times , Illustrated Weekly of India and National Herald , has been a vociferous peacenik.
But he doesn’t believe peace will come soon. “We need leaders with personality to carry their people through the tough compromises of any peace deal.”
Many feel that Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf are two such leaders, but Singh disagrees.
“I don’t think either Vajpayee or Musharraf has the ability to carry their nations. Will peace happen? I don’t know. Not in my time. We’ll fight on and on and there’s going to be a long time before we achieve peace.”
The future of India and the Congress, Singh said, was Rajiv and Sonia’s children, Priyanka and Rahul. "This country is getting younger, so should its politicians.
“I truly identified with the Gandhis and their politics, especially Rajiv, and even today I believe Sonia has done a great job in unifying the Congress party."
Known for his affiliation to the Gandhis and the Congress party it steered, Singh had run into trouble with Maneka Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi’s widow. She had sued him for defaming her husband and had stalled the publication of his autobiography Truth, Love and a Little Malice .
Singh, however, looks back at the incident with mirth. "I won. I always thought that if they fought some more, I would be dead by then and it wouldn’t matter.”
Once the enfant terrible of Indian journalism, Singh is a merry, albeit mellow man today. Once notorious for his excesses, an image largely self-cultivated, the nonagenarian now leads a rigidly disciplined life – waking and sleeping every day by the clock.
“I am what you call, more sinned against than sinning,” laughed Singh. His voice is startlingly clear – every word distinct. “I get up at 5 in the morning, every morning, and at eight in the evening, I drive all guests away.”
Born in a tiny village in what is now Pakistan to a wealthy family of builders, Singh trained in law. “And I was a miserable failure in it,” he said. “Imagine having to lead a life earning from people’s quarrels!”
So he shunned that, choosing to become a diplomat and then, in his most famous avatar, a journalist. “I’ve seen the world change, the whole power equation shift.”
He speaks slowly, in bits and bursts, as if conjoining sentences in his head and pouring them scalding hot with a loud hiss. In writing as in life Singh is nothing if not influential. His views, controversial or stereotypical, are never bland.
Like his belief that India shall always tower over Pakistan. "The last time I was in Pakistan, even the toilet paper and matches were Chinese. We in India are slowly advancing our manufacturing base even as we push our services industries.
“However, there shall never be another war. That’s ruled out. Only a lunatic will start a war and I don’t think anyone in either country is that foolish.”
At home, Singh is increasingly bothered by the upsurge of religion in everyday life. "Look at the number of religious channels on television, the number of religious gatherings and what not, all mumbo-jumbo and nonsense.
“But no one has anything new to say. Hogwash! Why can’t anyone tell their people not to increase the population?”
In spite of his reputation as one of India’s foremost whisky connoisseurs, Singh claims he has never been drunk in his life. And for all his sex-laden fiction, he finds the Kamasutra a “silly book”.
“It has all these funny descriptions of people - like women from this region smell like this and behave like that - all very strange.”
Singh is a former MP, who turned down the Padma Bhushan, protesting the 1984 storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
And he said he would be happy if he could keep that spirit alive so that his epitaph could read, in the words of Walter Savage Landor: “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife/Nature I loved, and, next to nature, art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life/It sinks, and I’m ready to depart.”