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It takes a lot to get a publisher to overcome his natural dislike for putting columns into the covers of a book. One needs either to be Khushwant Singh, or Know how to twist a publisher`s arm or to bribe him adequately before he`s willing to take the risk. But in Candid Corner, Universal Law Publishing may have found that profit and political compulsion can sometimes go together. How many lawyers in this country, for instance, have a mind versatile enough to leap from laws on bottom-slapping in Italy (it`s okay if it`s a one-off pat) to Arundhati Roy`s contempt of court hearing ("she was desperate to become a martyr") to the size of an Indian penis and its place in law (a wife can claim her partner is impotent if his size is too big for safe sex) to the simple contentment of his yoga teacher who gifts a penitent thief with all the stuff he stole from him. 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 a Cambridge, the opportunity of writing a regular column on anything and everything was "both excting 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 essyist`s knack of collecting seeming trivia, and the joy in the unexpeted 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. ISBN:8175344776
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Pages : 302
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