Books

Law-Di-Da

Hopefully, it won't be long before Singhvi liberates the author struggling to get out from the constraints of the columnist, and gives us a real book

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Law-Di-Da
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Candid Corner

Abhishek Singhvi, Congress spokesman, is a familiar face on TV, the urbane voice of reason and restraint. But what we discover in this collection of fortnightly columns published between 2001 and 2004, first in The Pioneer, then in the Hindustan Times, is a different man: a jurist, of course, and a commentator on national affairs and leaders but also an inveterate traveller, an ardent reader, and dreamer of big dreams.

For Singhvi, an ex-Stephanian who has studied and taught at Cambridge, the opportunity of writing a regular column on anything and everything was "both exciting and liberating". He felt, he says in the foreword, like "The Sunday Gentleman—Irving Wallace." The column didn’t liberate only the gentleman in Singhvi, but also the essayist in him. He has the essayist’s knack of collecting seeming trivia, and the joy in the unexpected as well as the pleasure in a well-written phrase or sentence. Hopefully, it won’t be long before he liberates the author struggling to get out from the constraints of the columnist, and gives us a real book.

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