A HALF-OPEN WINDOW

An honest critique of former vice-president Mohammad Hamid Ansari’s autobiography, By Many a Happy Accident, is difficult.

- Saeed Naqvi

BY MANY A HAPPY ACCIDENT

Recollections of a Life

by Mohammad Hamid Ansari

RUPA

There is, in our society, no tradition for clinical criticism. Instead, we have a culture of literary appreciation—polite and deferential. In this culture, my personal equation with Hamid bhai, one of warmth, cannot but intervene. Even so, reading the book, a question formed itself in my mind quite spontaneously: where are the sharp insights on events in this otherwise compelling narrative? It is not that insights are absent. Sometimes they are embedded in the narrative itself. But where is Hamid bhai, in full form, when he had the universe in his ken, analytical and penetrating, in his ample drawing rooms in Kabul, Tehran or New York.

Take this anecdote picked randomly from the book: former president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah’s rival for power, Asadullah Sarwari, was sent to pasture in Mongolia and Yemen. From Aden in Yemen, Sarwari escaped to New Delhi where he was detected by the Afghan security personnel. A scuffle followed. Sarwari, among others, was arrested. Najibullah contacted the cabinet secretarial in New Delhi seeking Sarwari’s repatriation for which he even sent a special plane. “The Home Ministry insisted on legal processes being followed,” writes Ansari. In other words, repatriation was being delayed.