Big Book of Malice Read online

  ‘Good people can be crashing bores. Evil men who combine evil-doing with drunkenness, debauchery and making illicit money make more interesting characters because they pack their lives with action. They do what most of us would like to do but do not have the guts to.’

  —Khushwant Singh

  Malice. The word is synonymous with Khushwant Singh; his pen has spared no one. For over four decades as India’s most widely-read columnist, he has commented on just about everything: Religion, politics, our future, our past, prohibition, impotency, Presidents, politicians, cricket, doghaters, astrologers, the banning of books, the secret of longevity…the list es endless.

  Candid to the point of being outrageous, Khushwant Singh makes both his reader and subject wince. He writes unabashedly on nose-picking, wife-bashing, bribing journalists, gender wars and the desires of an octogenarian; on Nehru and Edwina, Laloo, Bal Thackery, Chandraswami and Sonia Gandhi, among a host of others.

  Khushwant Singh’s Big Book of Malice brings together some of his nastiest and most irreverent pieces. Witty, sharp and brutally honest, this collection is certain to delight and provoke readers of all ages.

  Cover illustration by Mario Miranda

  Cover design by Bena Sareen

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  KHUSHWANT SINGH’S BIG BOOK OF MALICE

  Khushwant Singh was born in 1915 in Hadali, Punjab. He was educated at Government College, Lahore and at King’s College and the Inner Temple in London. He practised at the Lahore High Court for several years before joining the Indian Ministry of External Affairs in 1947. He began a distinguished career as a journalist with All India Radio in 1951. Since then he has been founder-editor of Yojna (1951-1953), editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India (1979-1980), chief editor of New Delhi (1979-1980), and editor of the Hindustan Times (1980-1983). Today he is India’s best-known columnist and journalist.

  Khushwant Singh has also had an extremely successful career as a writer. Among the works he has published are a classic two-volume history of the Sikhs, several novels (the best known of which are Delhi, Train to Pakistan and The Company of Women, and a number of translated works and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature and current affairs.

  Khushwant Singh was Member of Parliament from 1980-1986. Among other honours he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the President of India (he returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union Government’s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar).

  KHUSHWANT SINGH’S

  Big BOOK

  of Malice

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Foreword

  Nose-picking

  Why bookshops are important

  Bribing journalists

  With more sorrow than malice

  Laloo and the Tigress

  Salt on the Tiger’s tail

  Republic Day 1996

  Lodhi Gardens

  Bhookump

  Memories of November 1984

  Living longer: Making love to the last

  Tidal wave of intolerance

  Living longer: A healthy diet and pills

  Two days in Jamshedpur

  Stray thoughts on hawala

  Ministerial misconduct

  Magazine glut

  Hai hai cricket!

  The Edwina-Nehru affair

  Happy families

  Doing the dirty on women

  Law courts versus hospitals

  Awakening

  Beginning of a new era

  German yatra: Travel travails

  New netas, new problems

  Wife-bashing, Indian style

  How silly can we be?

  Old age and leadership

  Bapu Gandhi’s legacy

  In defence of Husain

  Maligning the Mahatma

  Republic Day 1997

  Shobha De and gender wars

  Authors and publishers

  There is more to life

  It will not work

  National Natak Mandali

  Murdering one’s ancestors

  The debate

  Faith and fanaticism

  A Sphinx called Sonia

  Fair deal for women

  Don’t change my TV channel

  VIP as Nuisance Number One

  On losing a friend

  Talk, talk—do nothing

  Laloo’s antics

  Not so golden a jubilee

  Banning and burning books

  Crime and punishment

  Blood on their lenses

  Book buying

  The demolished masjid—and after

  Morning blues

  The poor have more fun

  India’s Man of Destiny

  Looking forward to 1998

  Not wanted anywhere

  Why Indian Muslims don’t count

  Gandhi vs Godse

  A forgetful nation

  Fingers on the pulse

  Politics divorced from morality

  The inimitable R.K. Laxman

  Kakar’s Ascetic of Desire

  Day of rejoicing

  Fatwa on Rushdie

  Who are you trying to fool?

  Changing times

  Among the crawlers

  Crime uncontrolled

  A nation of windbags

  What a mess!

  Final warning

  Sonia: Bahu not beti

  Men are brainier

  Loving one’s neighbour

  Sweat and blood

  Garbage called astrology

  Turbulent weather

  Daghaa (Betrayal)

  After the war

  Views from the other side

  Among the Marwaris

  Prepare for death while alive

  Independence Day

  The one and only Nirad Babu

  And now, the verdict

  Unholy war against India

  Mumbai’s Star Achievers

  Pakistan and us

  Editors in WPBs

  Mocking the law

  Dog-haters and astrologers

  Ugly Indian of the new millennium

  A nation of litterbugs

  Thumbs up, thumbs down

  Farewell to 1999

  Biased media

  Down with bigotry

  Religion to serve the people

  The Comeback Kid

  Hometown Delhi

  Foreword

  I have never taken any person or event too seriously, least of all myself. I have always been a nosey person for ever probing into other people’s private lives. I love to gossip and have an insatiable appetite for scandal. Forty years ago when I landed my first job as editor of Yojna, I discovered I could exploit these negative traits in my character to my benefit. Readers were amused by what I wrote and asked for more. An editor of The Times of India who carried the burden of the country on his head scoffed at me as he remarked, ‘You have made bull-shit an art form.’ I was flattered.

  I resumed my column when I took over as editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1969. I wrote on subjects other editors considered beneath contempt. I wrote on why some monkeys have red bottoms, on the refined art of bottom-pinching, shop-lifting without being caught, the joys of drinking, mocking politicians, godmen, astrologers. Above all, name-droppers were my favourite target. I had great fun writing these columns and evidently people enjoyed reading them. My friend Mario Miranda designed the logo putting me in a bulb with a pile of books and a bottle of whiskey beside me. It has become my trademark. My colleague Bachi Karkaria who helped me write some of my better pieces summed me up in three words: sex, Scotch and scholarship. I found the third untrue but flattering.

  After I was sacked from The Illustrated Weekly, I carried
my column to The National Herald, then to New Delhi and finally to The Hindustan Times. When my contract for editorship of The Hindustan Times was terminated, I was asked by the proprietor K.K. Birla to continue writing my weekly column on a freelance basis with permission to syndicate it. That proved to be a bonanza. Now my two columns ‘With Malice …’ and ‘…This Above All’ are picked up by papers all over the country in both English and regional languages. They bring me dough and notoriety. I hope this compendium brings more of both.

  Khushwant Singh

  Nose-picking

  It is a nauseating habit most of us indulge in when no one is looking. Tolstoy was forthright in his condemnation: ‘People who pick their noses and dispose of the pickings on the undersides of the dinner table are not likely ever to see God.’

  So few of us are likely to be let in the Pearly Gates and have darshan of the Almighty. Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species found this one distinguishing factor between us and our simian cousins. ‘Monkeys do not pick their noses,’ he wrote. ‘This is about the only disgusting personal human habit at which they are not also adept.’

  Who in the world would have thought of writing a book on the subject except an American! So one has—a Yank by the name of Donald Wetzel. My friend Amir C. Tuteja (Punjabi-turned-US citizen), who lives in Washington DC and periodically sends me off-beat literature, included The Nose Pickers’ Guide (Ivory Tower Publishing Co.) along with two others, The New York City Cab Drivers’ Joke Book which I will write about later in this column, and The Fart Book about which I will not say anything lest it creates a stink.

  A new word you may like to add to your vocabulary is ‘booger’. It is the stuff you extract out of your nostrils. They are of two kinds: dry boogers and wet boogers. Whatever kind they be, you instinctively try to stick them on the sides of the chair you are sitting on, or under the table. If you happen to be out on a walk, you stick them to the sides of your trousers. Beware of depositing them on your bed head-rest because the king of shrinks, Sigmund Freud, declared that ‘People who put their nose pickings on the pillow case are sick.’

  Donald Wetzel has drawn a list of many varieties of boogers. In the dry variety are marble, buck shot, black hole, dry hairy (firmly attached to a large hair in the nostril), smoky bear and pygmy.

  Then there is the phantom which does not really exist except in your imagination and you go on probing for it in your nostrils endlessly till somebody screams at you to stop.

  There is also a bastard booger which refuses to be moulded into a disposable shape and sticks to your finger no matter how much you try to get rid of it. Similarly, wet boogers have many sub-species: fish-eye, pizza, elastic, chicken turd etc.

  Two aspects of nose-picking should be noticed. First is that few people dig for them in their nostrils with handkerchiefs. Most people enjoy the exercise using only their index fingers. Oscar Wilde wrote ‘Show me a man who picks his nose with his pinky and I’ll show you a man with a nose like a rabbit.’

  The other noticeable aspect is that the habit of nose-picking is far more prevalent among men than women. Queen Victoria remarked, ‘If one would remain a lady or gentleman, one must thoroughly wash one’s hands after picking one’s nose.’ Her Britannic Majesty was not a nose-picker and was not amused if she caught any of her courtiers probing their nostrils with their fingers.

  4 March 1995

  Why bookshops are important

  I have a rough-and-ready yardstick to measure the quality of life of towns and cities. On the positive side are the number of schools, colleges and bookstores they have; on the negative, the number of cinemas and restaurants. But the ultimate litmus test of a town’s sophistication is the number of bookshops it has, the kind of books they stock and the customers they draw.

  Stores that cater to students selling school and college textbooks do not count. It is others which have books on fiction, poetry, science, technology, philosophy, comparative religion and general knowledge, and the kind of people who buy them.

  I am heartened to see that though prices of books keep going up, book-buying is also on the increase. Bengalis have always been book buyers. The day they receive their salaries, they go to buy their ration of reading for the month. Dal-bhaath and maacher jhole are second priority. People of other states are picking up the habit.

  Punjabis, who are at the bottom of my list as book buyers (top of the list of consumers of beer and tandoori chicken), are turning more bookish. I had evidence of this recently at Chandigarh.

  The Capital Bookstore, which is a leading bookshop in the city, had the bright idea of inviting authors to meet their patrons and autograph their books for them.

  Upamanyu Chatterjee (English, August) drew a stream of admirers and signed away scores of books. I did not do as well. Many people came simply to gape at me and made me sign books by other authors. However, Capital Books found the exercise commercially viable.

  15 April 1995

  Bribing journalists

  Nothing new about it: ever since the first newspaper was published, attempts were made by politicians and businessmen to keep proprietors, editors and reporters on their right side. The best way of keeping people on one’s right side is to periodically grease their palms. As the press grew in size and became the most powerful moulder of public opinion, governments, industrial houses and ambitious politicians devised ways and means to keep media persons happy.

  Since the central and state governments are the largest advertisers, they disburse their patronage in different ways: selective disbursing of advertisements, subsidized housing, invitations to accompany prime ministers and Presidents on foreign tours, nominations to state councils or the Rajya Sabha, invitations to tour states to publicize development projects or sites of tourist interest, awards etc.

  Industrial houses likewise place advertisements in papers which support them; withhold them from those which do not. Ambitious politicians get round media persons by entertaining them or giving them gifts. Within limits these means of keeping media people happy did no great harm and did not sully the image of Indian journalism very much.

  However, in the last decade or so, chief ministers have become more blatant in their dealings with the press, and press people more shameless in accepting largesse and writing false reports in favour of the hands that feed them.

  It was left to Mayawati, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, to expose how much her predecessor had done to corrupt the media: outright grants of cash running into lakhs of rupees to editors, correspondents and reporters from his discretionary quota; paying their medical bills, out-of-turn allotment of cars, scooters, cooking gas and telephones.

  The image of the Indian press as a purchasable commodity has sunk to the lowest. I recall the comments of the owner of a tavern which was largely patronized by prostitutes. He gave drinks and meals to newspapermen at half rates. When asked the reason he replied, ‘Commercial courtesy to an allied profession.’

  Although I have been in journalism for almost forty years, since I did not write much on politics, no attempts were made to bribe me. Of course I received a lot of invitations to cocktail parties and dinners and was invited by foreign and state governments on non-official visits and entertained right royally. No one offered me cash or gifts.

  Like most others in my profession, I got a bottle of Scotch or two on Divali or New Year’s Eve and at times some readers sent me a basket of mangoes or matthees. I accepted them gratefully because I did not regard them as bribes. The final test of whether or not a journalist has been bribed is what he writes about the people from whom he has received gifts.

  I have never let small gifts or flattery effect my judgement. For me, a bewitching smile is more corrupting than a crate of premium brand Scotch. I am very much like foolish English media men:

  You never hope to bribe or twist

  Thank God; an English journalist.

  But knowing what the fellow will do

  Unbribed, there is no occasion to.
/>   9 September 1995

  With more sorrow than malice

  A week before Christmas, the temperature dropped low enough to give us an excuse to light a fire in the sitting room. There is something very romantic about an open fireplace which electric radiators cannot match. The cheerful crackle of wood followed by the silent glow of embers of coal does something to the human soul. They evoke nostalgia for the days of long ago. In my case, of pre-Christmas days in England when I went round with English boys and girls singing, carols at neighbours’ doorsteps—‘Silent Night, Holy Night’, ‘Hark, The Herald Angels Sing’, ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ among others; of people once loved who have gone out of my life—either dead or estranged.

  It was not so much the personal past that occupied my mind this Christmas. It was what had happened to my country in the year drawing to a close. I turned over the leaves of my diary in which I record daily events: What I did, names of people who died, earthquakes, floods, fires, rail disasters, election results, changes of governments etc. I wanted to give 1995 a name which would depict most of what happened. I decided to label it the year of Chandraswami. To me, Chandraswami symbolizes the worst in our national character: saffron cloak and beard—the traditional garb of renunciation camouflaging pursuit of worldly wealth and power, befriending arms dealers, utilizing call girls, manoeuvring empty-headed politicians and civil servants, hiring criminals to eliminate critics. More distressing than his personality was the fact that he continued to wield enormous influence and received homage from hundreds of thousands of his countrymen and women.

  I suspect it was the immoral atmosphere created by the acceptance of men like Chandraswami that paved the way for the resurgence of religion-dominated parties like the Shiv Sena, VHP, and BJP: they made good showing in the elections. They also revealed their total disregard for commitment to political principles. BJP factions ditched the BJP; Telugu Desam ditched Telugu Desam, BJP ditched Mayawati. Letting down their allies of yesterday carried no odium.

  We groped in the dark looking for leaders who would, by example, show us the way. That was not to be. Jayalalitha indulged in a wedding extravaganza unparalleled in the history of recent times. Far from reprimanding her, to the prime minister’s grand daughter’s wedding, 25,000 guests were invited. None of this vulgar display of power and opulence took place during the times of Pandit Nehru or Indira Gandhi. What happened to the Guest Control Order which forbade inviting more than fifty guests?