That such a petition had been entertained at all would have appalled the best known Sikh writer of modern India, Khushwant Singh. The book contains several essays on humour, with Khushwant writing that his best jokes were unprintable because they had to do with sex. In another essay, Khushwant comments: ‘We Indians may have lost our sense of humour but we still have a rich laboratory of materials to work on. Khushwant was warm, wise, witty, and (in terms of his cultural sensibilities) well-rounded, but, when it came to assessing power-hungry ideologues, utterly simple-minded. A few years later, he was to see in another malign individual, Sanjay Gandhi, the saviour of the nation itself.

Source: Hindustan Times July 15, 2017 12:00 UTC