khushwant singh

i always thought khushwant singh is an ass. atleast some writings declared so. or maybe some of my peers [when i was young] said so. infact at one time i thought it was fashionable too to say so. so did i say so.

there was a chapter in the text book when i was in eighth standard which accentuated the feeling of baseness that people used to attach with singh.

i bought delhi. i guess it came as a surprise to me that it was written by khushwant singh. but i think i didn't pay much attention because i am always inclined to read anything about delhi in a novel form - fiction or not. when i was nearly finishing reading it i bought the company of women for the plain reason that his way of writing intermittent erotic struck me. it was in-your-face but frank and in taste, although a bit brazen.

but i didn't really realize that i had bought his another work, train to pakistan, too. i started reading it first for 2 reasons. first, prashant wanted to read it so i had to finish it to give it to him and second, i wanted to finish of the partition related apparently tragic drama before starting with the stylish and veiled erotic literature.

i just completed it. and when i completed it i wasn't sure. it was a love story. although i am not fully sure as to what the protagonist did [in the end] was for the love of the female form or for the human form.

[it was a story where i at the end was not sure if i should feel happy about feeling sad or feel sad about feeling happy]

i now have a respect for singh which is due to a person who has compassion for human life, an honesty to say things which our hypocrisy don't let us otherwise and be ourselves.