Tag: memoirs

Authors, Book Reviews

“Kitne Ghazi Aaye Kitne Ghazi Gaye”: Lt Gen. KJS Dhillon (Retd)

Of course, I had heard of General Dhillon, especially when he commanded the Indian Army’s 15 Corps in Kashmir. I was thrilled to hear that he had published his memoirs having heard so much about this illustrious soldier. I had the pleasure of reading, “Kitne Ghazi Aaye, Kitne Ghazi Gaye” recently. This book was published by Penguin Veer in January 2023. I know he has since written another book but we will come to that in due course of time.

As an avid reader of contemporary military history, I have read the biographies of many Generals/ Admirals/Air Chief Marshals from the days of World War 2. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are many about Indian military leaders. Yes, there have been books on Field Marshal Cariappa and General K S Thimayya but not on many others, as far as I know. It was refreshing therefore to read a more contemporary account of a General of great repute who retired from active service but recently.

In his well-written book which is full of interesting anecdotes, General Dhillon takes us back to his childhood in Punjab. From a young age, he and his friends wanted to be in the Indian Army. Not surprising considering that many of their family had served the paltan. The book takes us on General Dhillon’s journey from being a young cadet at the National Defence Academy to rising to the high position of Director General, Defence Intelligence Agency. In the course of 35 years in uniform, General Kanwal Jeet Singh Dhillon had to deal with many challenges, some of which he has described in considerable detail in the book.

Perhaps because ours was, is and always probably will be a volunteer force, sadly most civilians in India have little or no idea of what life in the Indian Army entails. Conscription and compulsory military service in many countries give their citizens insights into life in the Services as many have served in them themselves. Apart from his own professional challenges, it was great to see General Dhillon write at length about the lives of the families of Army personnel. We cannot find adequate words to describe the role they play in helping our soldiers defend our borders. He writes about the challenges and hardships they frequently face and the courage with which they face these challenges.

The terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir have taken a toll since Independence. General Dhillon has served several tours of duty in this region since 1988 and writes authoritatively about his experiences here in different capacities over the decades.

As General Dhillon exhorted his troops, ” Wear your uniform with honour and pride, which is bestowed on only the select few, and ensure you make a difference in whatever you do in the service of the nation. Your nation, army, regiment and platen is the pride that you will live and die for.”

I would strongly recommend this book – with its arresting book cover picture- to every Indian. I follow General Dhillon on X.com and suggest you do the same. After all, each and every Indian can and should do all we can to defend our country against its enemies. Jai Hind!

Authors, Book Reviews

“Hillbilly Elegy” by J D Vance

To be honest, I had never ever heard of J D Vance until recently. Only when Donald Trump chose him to be his running mate did I hear his name. The focus of many stories I read here in India were more about his wife Usha. That was because her parents were immigrants from India.

I then found his book, ” Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” (Harper, 2016). You must remember he wrote this long before he became a Senator from Ohio. In 2016, no one would have imagined that Vance would become a candidate for Vice President of the United States! This happened only in July 2024. We should keep this in mind as we read Vance’s book.

This is Vance’s personal account of what it was like to have a deeply troubled family life. I admired his honesty in sketching out the principal characters in his life. These include his drug -addicted much-married mother; his sister, who was his biggest support; and his maternal grandparents. They influenced him deeply as he grew up. Indeed, it was his grandmother who played a huge role in shaping his thinking . She helped him escape out of the poverty- stricken, addiction- oriented life he would otherwise have led.

Many people, especially those outside the US, believe that all white people in the US are very well off. Vance’s book describes the difficulties faced by most poor white families in small towns and mining communities. These were compounded when blue collared jobs became scarce. Manufacturing and mining took a steep dive in profitability. Unemployment grew in leaps and bounds. This phenomenon made large parts of the northeast of the United States being called the Rust Belt. As a consequence of economic downfall, social and family ties were adversely affected. The number of broken marriages, broken homes and domestic turbulence increased substantially. Vance lived through all this as a kid. It was naturally his ambition to break out of the chains of poverty.

Vance explains how his four year spell in the US Marine Corps was a turning point in his life. He then attended Ohio State University -not surprisingly the first from his family to do so. He worked hard to achieve his dream of getting admitted into and graduating from the prestigious Yale Law School.

And no, though his wife Usha is mentioned in the book, not much is written about her. Of course, Vance describes how much she helped him at Yale Law School. That apart readers in India looking for stories about her family would be disappointed. I don’t think he even mentioned that her parents migrated from India!

The book underlines how adversity is a tough teacher. You learn a lot when you are dealt with many knocks in your life. Especially when you face many hardships- financial and emotional- at an early and impressionable age.

Book Reviews

“My Life In Full” by Indra Nooyi

I would recommend this book to every Indian student of business and practicing professionals as well for it was an absorbing read. The full title is “My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future” and it was first published by Portfolio in September 2021.

This is the story of Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi – a middle class Tamil girl born in Chennai, India in 1955, who we now know for having been the CEO of PepsiCo– one of the largest business corporations in the world. There were many firsts in her career. Ms Nooyi was the first woman to become the CEO of PepsiCo , the first person of colour and an immigrant to reach the highest position in a Fortune 50 corporation. For many years, she featured in the list of The Most Powerful Women in the world.

Like most middle-class families in Chennai- if not everywhere in India- the focus of her early life was on attaining a good education. She says in her conservative Brahmin family, “education was everything”. Naturally, from a young age she was accustomed to striving for excellence- a high priority for her family. In her early life, she looked up to her paternal grandfather, apart from her parents, for guidance and support in all that she did.

Nooyi speaks at length about their house in Chennai. We get considerable detail about her life- growing up with her elder sister, younger brother, parents, and grandfather -in a large house where many traditions were followed. She shone in her studies at the Holy Angels Anglo Indian Higher Secondary School, run by Irish nuns, and later at the famous Madras Christian College. In both places, she was an excellent debater and took part in many extra-curricular activities. In those years, it was unheard of to have an all girls rock band but she was part of one!

She then did her Post Graduate Degree in Management from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta . Here she was one of the very few girls in the class, as also one of the few fresh graduates who did not have work experience. On graduation in 1976, she worked with Mettur Beardsell and Johnson & Johnson in India before leaving for the United States for a Master’s degree in Public and Private Management at the Yale University’s School of Management in 1978.

She was selected by the Boston Consulting Group in 1980. Even to this day she rates her experience there very highly. Then followed stints with progressively higher responsibilities at Motorola and Asea Brown Boveri, where again she achieved considerable professional success. She then joined PepsiCo in 1994. While still in her early 30s, she was in the Executive Group of a major US corporation. She became the President and Chief Financial Officer in 2001 and was appointed as the CEO in 2006. She held that high office till 2018. During her years at the helm of PepsiCo, the business revenues grew by 80 % to $ 63 billion. There were many strategic initiatives she introduced including her much admired Performance with Purpose program.

Ms. Nooyi is candid enough to admit that she had lucky breaks in her career. Fortunately for her, she had mentors who saw the potential in her and helped her develop skills by pushing her towards challenging assignments.

She got married in 1980 to Raj Nooyi. In the book, she writes at length about the struggles they had managing their careers and their growing family of two daughters. Here too she is quick to give credit to her support system by way of family, especially her mother, and other relatives from her husband’s family who pitched in to help them out. By the way, I never knew that Nooyi is a small village in the Dakshina Kannada district of my home state of Karnataka.

She is often asked about how it was to become a woman in the top echelons of corporate life. All over the world, the infamous glass ceiling frequently restricts women from progressing in their careers. Seldom do they reach the very pinnacle as Ms Nooyi did. In this book she shares her views and suggestions, based on her own experience and her observations after interacting with a wide cross section of women at work across all parts of the world.

Overall it was an interesting book. I admire Ms Nooyi for her candidness in describing her career, her family, and the organisations she worked for and led.

Her story is inspirational indeed!

Authors, Book Reviews

“Always A Foreigner” by Ashwini Devare

The Indian Foreign Service has always been considered a highly prestigious organisation, especially when I was growing up in the 1950s and the 1960s. It was said that this branch of the All India Civil Services was the first choice for successful candidates. It was also believed that the children of IFS officers lived a most luxurious life, traveling all over the world.

” Always A Foreigner: A Memoir ” by Ashwini Devare puts at rest the myth about children of IFS officers. She writes of how actually the frequent transfers came in the way of a steady education. While the exposure to different countries of the world brought many benefits in its wake, it could also result in children getting disoriented through having to unlearn and relearn all the time in a new environment. In her own case, she had lived in six different countries by the time she was fifteen so, as you can imagine, she is best qualified to write about these experiences.

Ms Devare’s memoirs are delightful! They capture how she and her family coped in different lands where her father represented India in various capacities, over the decades from the 1960s till the start of the 21st century. What makes the book more interesting is her interspersing her personal memories with major events that took place at that time. She describes, amongst other incidents, how the Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri passed away in Tashkent when they were in Moscow; how the Chogyal and the Gyalmo- their Royal Highnesses The King and Queen of Sikkim – fled Gangtok when they were there; and when they were in New Delhi how horrible events traumatized the city following the assassination of Prime Minster Indira Gandhi.

In addition, we are treated to rich slices of her family life. She has captured her characters so well that we feel we have met them in person. Her father, deeply committed to his country and his responsibilities; her mother, who first went abroad as a young bride barely days after her marriage ; and her sister who grew up with her, and how they shared many experiences while they were quite different from each other by way of personalities.

In the course of the book, Ms Devare captures the highpoints of her career as a broadcast journalist, an on-air reporter and producer, and later as a writer. She studied and worked in different countries and experienced many challenges in each of them.

I enjoyed the elegant yet simple writing style which is a characteristic of this book. I also appreciated the high degree of candor and honesty displayed by the author. I would highly recommend this book to those interested in travel and history. Indeed, I would recommend this to anyone looking to enjoy some good writing !

Authors, Book Reviews

“Restless: Chronicles of a Policeman” by Dr V. R. Sampath IPS

I must admit that I found it rather difficult to write a review of “Restless: Chronicles of a Policeman” by Dr V R Sampath IPS (Retd). On reflection, I think the difficulty was in distinguishing between Dr Sampath the person and the book he wrote. From what one gathers from the book, Dr Sampath is an admirable and talented individual. He comes across as being honest, upright and with a big need to satiate his inborn curiosity to learn new things. I particularly liked his message that we need to constantly re – invent ourselves in order to survive, if not flourish in a fast changing world. This message has huge impact as most people tend to become complacent with their successes. Consequently they feel all at sea when the world around them changes and makes their skills redundant.

This message has been exemplified by the author in his own life as he has transformed himself with the passage of time. As far as career is concerned, he started work in a bank then was selected to India’s prestigious Indian Police Service where he served with distinction for 25 years . Most of his batchmates would have stayed on in the Police Service and retired, but Sampath being restless left the service at the peak of his career. He still had a decade of service left before the age of retirement. He joined India’s private sector businesses and held important positions there, working with some of the country’s top most industrialists like the Ambanis and the Adanis, to name a few. He then left the world of business, to begin all over again as a student when he enrolled for the MFA program in Creative Writing in the United States. Of course, the fact that both his sons were well settled in the United States contributed, I would imagine, to this decision.

The book itself is in two parts, the first half ” Mechanical Life & Awakening” deals with his career as mentioned briefly above. The chronicles of a policeman were not as exciting as I imagined they would be. There are descriptions of waiting for cadre allotments, transfers, postings and the like but not too many incidents about his experiences as a top cop. The few that have been described have been very well written which leads me to believe that instead of the book being equally divided in two parts, I would have preferred if the book was 75-80 % about his policing days and 20-25 % about his explorations of life, for the many like me who are less spiritually inclined. He could later have written a separate book built on Part 2 of this book. Sir, by the way, as a child you read Erle Stanley Gardner and not Perry Mason.

The second part is titled,  “Exploration, Expansion and Integration.” As you will appreciate, this lifetime of diverse experiences enabled Dr Sampath  to think deeply of life and what it means in its entirety. Being of a scholarly and spiritual bent of mind, he did not rest content with his first Ph.D  ( about Airline Security) in India. He is currently working towards the Master’s degree in Fine Arts specialising in Creative Writing and subsequent PhD in Consciousness Studies at School of Consciousness and Transformation at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He summarizes the essence of his life experiences in one sentence: ” Life is accidental and random in occurring, unless your consciousness level is high enough to neutralise them.”

Dr Sampath said he, all through his life and career held on to his identity which has four parts. In his own words, he says, ” first and foremost , I am a Hindu; second, I am a Tamilzhan, third , I am a Brahmin; and fourth I am a Srivaishnavan. I am aware that all four have been under siege for hundreds of years. I am confident that one day, all of them would triumph.” Hats off to you, Sir.

All in all, if you are spiritually inclined and would like to explore what life means you would love this book. If not, the second part could be heavy reading as it needs concentrated attention as it has vast amounts of information and insight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Authors, Book Reviews

“Born Smiling: A Father’s Tribute” by K Ravi

How would you react if, God forbid, you were to be pre deceased by your child? Just the very thought would shock and send you into a frenzy, right? My friend, K Ravi who went through this sad experience took the courageous decision to write a book, as a tribute to his daughter.  I am delighted that he has recently joined our ranks as a published author. My sincere congratulations to him. His book, ” Born Smiling: A Father’s Tribute” was published earlier this month. I am so happy for him as I know how much the writing of this book means to him.

I had the pleasure of being invited to be the Guest of Honour at the book launch. We had an interesting conversation on what motivated him to write the book, what he hoped to gain from the experience and how it could be of help to others whose children may be facing depression and other difficulties.

A roar of applause greeted Ravi’s announcement at the book launch that all sale proceeds from this book would be donated to two NGOs carrying on laudable service, namely Sa Mudra Foundation, and Youth Empowerment Foundation. This is indeed a moving gesture on his part.

In the foreword to this book, I wrote, ” Perhaps the saddest thing that can happen to any parent is to have their child pre-decease them. A mortal blow from which many never fully recover. Sushmitha, the author’s beloved daughter passed away in April 2016 when she was just 34. It is to the author’s credit that he found it in himself to write in considerable detail about his daughter and the life she led. ”

 

I went on to say, ” In his introduction, the author expresses the hope that this book will help others in similar circumstances as his daughter as she suffered from time to time with acute depression. An article in ” Medical News Today” says, ‘The causes of depression are not fully understood but are likely to be a complex combination of genetic,  biological, environmental, and psychosocial factors.’  Reading this book will tell you how apt this definition is. The author needs to be commended for his honesty in sharing his life story and his grief.”

The book is currently available with Sa Mudra Foundation but will soon, I am informed by Ravi, be available on online portals like Amazon and the like.

By the way, I have known Ravi for 45 years as he was my classmate in XLRI, Jamshedpur. He can be contacted at : ravikris4@gmail.com.

 










		


		

			






	

					

				

					
Authors, Book Reviews
“Train To Nowhere” by Anita Leslie
				

			

		
		

			
Over the decades I have read ever so many books about the Second World War. Most have been by professional journalists or by the military top brass who have written about their own experiences. I have just finished what must be one of the best autobiographies I have read which has the Second World War as a backdrop. This is “Train To Nowhere” by Anita Leslie, a young lady from a well to do aristocratic Anglo-Irish family who was distantly related to Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. In 1940,  aged 26 she joined the Mechanised Transport Corps where she became a qualified mechanic and ambulance driver, to do her bit for the war effort.


 Continue reading ““Train To Nowhere” by Anita Leslie” →

		


		

			






	

					

				

					
Book Reviews
“Losing Amma, Finding Home” by Uma Girish
				

			

		
		

			
The title of the book was extremely catchy. ” Losing Amma, Finding Home” grabbed my attention at the book store. The brief description of the book, ” A Memoir About Love, Loss and Life’s Detours” made me buy it right then.  I am glad I did because I thoroughly enjoyed Uma’s book. Perhaps I could relate to the descriptions more as I am very familiar with the middle-class Madras (now Chennai) milieu she writes about. Continue reading ““Losing Amma, Finding Home” by Uma Girish” →

		


		

			






	

					

				

					
Book Reviews
“Return To India” A Memoir by Shoba Narayan
				

			

		
		

			
I have always loved reading memoirs and was delighted to come across, ” Return to India” by Shoba Narayan. Here she writes of the angst caused in most Indian-Americans caught in a within the mind crossfire between the country where they were born and bred as children and their adopted country which has given them more than abundant monetary and other worldly conveniences they would not have got in the Old Country.


Shoba was highly focused on her goal as a teenager growing up in Madras ( as Chennai was called in those days) and her goal was to go to the United States away from the protective, cloying environment provided by family and friends. She imagined being free of all constraints and living a life of her own where she could start afresh and do whatever she pleased in a land of endless opportunity. Continue reading ““Return To India” A Memoir by Shoba Narayan” →

		


		

			






	

					

				

					
Book Reviews
“Lucknow Boy” by Vinod Mehta
				

			

		
		

			
I have seen Vinod Mehta often on television programs where he holds forth on a variety of issues. I have known him to be a strong supporter of the Congress Party and a self- proclaimed “pseudo-secularist.” It was with considerable interest therefore that I read his memoirs titled, “Lucknow Boy” published by Penguin India. The book gets its name from the fact that Mehta grew up in Lucknow and stayed in touch with the city of his childhood and youth. Continue reading ““Lucknow Boy” by Vinod Mehta” →