TRUTH, LOVE, AND A LITTLE MALICE: KHUSHWANT SINGH'S "OFFICIAL" AUTOBIOGRAPHY

<p>Khushwant Singh, the celebrated<br>journalist, came out with his long-awaited<br>autobiography in 2002. The persona of this<br>author in his Truth, Love is fairly consistent<br>with the one reflected in his earlier<br>journalistic writings. This genre of writing<br>which intends to talk about the self is often<br>construed as an exercise in vanity or as a<br>wild goose chase – the self, after all, is<br>something elusive, and is even regarded, by<br>many, as a fictional construct. Memory may<br>colour one’s past in its own idiosyncratic<br>ways; incidents, for the remembering<br>subject, may come to assume meanings quite<br>different from the ones they had for the<br>experiencing subject; and the process of<br>conscious or unconscious suppressions may<br>create complexities of its own. The reader<br>finds herself confronting such questions,<br>among others, in a deceptively<br>straightforward, although thoroughly<br>delectable, narrative in Singh’s tale about his<br>“self.”</p>