BENGALURU: Call him what you may – ‘indiscreet’, ‘irreverential’, or ‘irrefragable’, Mani Shankar Aiyar knows how to hold an audience with his frank and forthright remarks. With a colourful career in the Indian Foreign Service – one which began in Mussoorie and took him to Karachi, Brussels, Hanoi and a host of other places – and later as a politician, Aiyar’s career has been marked with several highs and many lows.
On Friday, Aiyar was in the city at the Bangalore International Centre in Domlur, to launch his book, Memoirs of a Maverick: The First Fifty Years (1941–1991), the first of a three-part series, where he shares some of his early influences, the life of a diplomat, strengthening Indo-Pak ties by managing India’s first consulate general in Karachi and then going onto work intimately with Rajiv Gandhi in the PMO.
“I wouldn’t call it an autobiography, I find the word pretentious. Nehru wrote an autobiography, people like me write a memoir,” says Aiyar, who was in conversation with former Foreign Secretary of India, Nirupama Menon Rao and journalist Nupur Basu at a session titled, Out of Syllabus: Mani Shankar Aiyar Unfiltered.
The first part (published by Juggernaut and priced at `800) delves into his first five decades – from his childhood at Dehradun where he was raised by his feisty widowed mother to nearly becoming the president of the Cambridge Union, and working as a young diplomat. “I was brought up in penury and poverty, so much so we never had home clothes and wore the school uniform during holidays,” recalls Aiyar, who was the ‘poorest boy’ in the richest school, The Doon School, Dehradun.
Incidentally, it was here that he was schoolmates with Rajiv Gandhi, who he later went on to work with the PMO. “He was three years junior to me in a school where no one gave a toss that he was the PM’s grandson. There was this rule that a student who had done the Senior Cambridge exam was designated a senior and would have to give the ‘juniors’ permission to use the pool. So a shy 14-year-old boy walked up to me saying, ‘Yaar, give us permission to swim yaar’, which I graciously did. I often wonder had I done the usual Doon School thing of not agreeing, whether I would have got into Rajiv Gandhi’s PMO,” he shares with a laugh.
His childhood connection with Gandhi was often misconstrued and Aiyar clarifies that he only shared an ‘official’ relationship with him after he joined Gandhi’s PMO. “I must mention that I always called him ‘Sir’,” says Aiyar, whose book, The Rajiv I Knew and Why He Was India’s Most Misunderstood Prime Minister will be out in a couple of months. “I just handed over the manuscript before coming to Bengaluru,” he says.
Known for his wit and many indiscretions, Aiyar often found and finds himself in a spot. Like this one time, he was asked by an editor of a newspaper if Gandhi believed in God. Late at night and not able to check with Gandhi himself, Aiyar reasoned that a modern, rational man would likely be an atheist. The next morning he went into the PM’s cabin and informed him of his answer, only to be astonished when Gandhi retorted, ‘But I do believe in God.’
Speaking of which, and admitting to a streak of irreverence – a quality he and his brother inherited from their mother – Aiyar recalls living in a religious household but becoming a firm atheist by the age of 15. “And yet despite knowing that her children did not agree with her, she never stopped us. From Amma, we learnt to be independent in thought and take the consequences of our speech and actions. You can’t expect people you have been irreverent to, to be kind to you. You say what you want but you have to know full well that you will be attacked by the people you have,” he says.