William James once said that, "The greatest use of life is to spend it for
something that will outlast it". Over the years people have tried to
create monuments that were their effort at cheating their own mortality and
time- building giant statues, fancy palaces, and in more contemporary times,
leaving huge estates and bank balances. Whenever I see and hear of these
material tributes, I am always reminded of a favourite poem of my childhood,
Ozymandias by Shelley where a traveller encounters the broken remains of a
long-forgotten king's tribute to his own vanity.
So when it comes to doing something that acts both as a tribute from son to
father and symbolizes how I think my father would have liked his legacy to be
kept alive, I tend to shun these material and temporal tributes. Instead, I
want to focus on something that bound us- a belief in the power of ideas and
the power of the written word.
So Phase I of my tribute is over. In one
stroke, it makes my father's words and ideas accessible to hundreds of millions of readers worldwide, and has two
major parts.
The first part is digitizing and making
available on the Amazon Kindle store some of my father's books. I have started
with three books which I know he enjoyed the most, and will over time get to
others.
The first is of course, his highest
selling and most controversial book- Open Secrets.
The #1 Indian non-fiction bestseller which is regarded as a seminal work in
security matters is now available to readers worldwide. My father used to tell
me with a chuckle that Open Secrets had earned him four death threats and six
threatened court cases.
Accompanying it is Operation XXX, which I know my father always smiled about because while
it was fiction, it held more than a kernel of truth in it. Third up is Fulcrum of Evil- a prescient treatise about how what the West takes to be its
allies in the War on Terror are sometimes its worst enemies.
The second part has been collating some
of his essays into a series. The first four volumes in this series, titled `I,
Spy' are now up on the Kindle store- dealing with topical security issues, all
dealt with in the same penetrating and no-BS style my father was famous for. The first two of these, Warriors of
Allah and Talibanized
Pakistan are already online, while Volumes 3 (China at Sea) and
4 (Whither Kashmir) will be up in a day.
Phase II is going to be finishing the
unfinished manuscript that he left on his hard drive- but between a move to
Singapore for my family and a new assignment, I'll get around to that in a
couple of months. It's a story about human trafficking in the Indian
subcontinent, and knowing how my father never shied away from showing the true
nature of many of the people and institutions we trust, it'll take a courageous
publisher to pick it up.
Ever since I was a child, I
dreamed of being a writer, and have been blessed with the opportunity to be
that, but this first experience as a publisher is perhaps even more satisfying
as it allows me to start living up to my promise of keeping my father's legacy
alive in my own small way.
