BENGALURU: Vir Sanghvi seems very content at this point. With the release of his latest book, A Rude Life: The Memoir, which has become the talk of the town, Sanghvi now feels he’s done it all and is ready to hang up his boots. “Before the age of 50, I’ve done everything I should have done as part of my career. I am no longer moved by small goals. I take each day as it comes,” says Sanghvi, whose book gives us an insider’s view into the politics and glamour of that time.
But he’s enjoying the adulation as long as it lasts. In the city to attend ‘Telling it like it is’ at the Bangalore International Centre, on August 18, Sanghvi’s memoir happened quite by chance. “During the first lockdown in March 2020, I had more than enough time on hand to write a couple of hours every day. Everyone was anyway trying to figure how Zoom works, so I thought I might as well do something more meaningful,” he says, adding that by the time he reached chapter 60, he ran out of steam. “If there was no lockdown, there wouldn’t have been a book either,” he says with a laugh.
A Rude Life: The Memoir shares stories about his childhood, college years, some of the interactions he’s had with prominent political and cultural figures celebrities like the Clintons, the Gandhis, Beatle George Harrison, Raj Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan, to name a few. “I’m not the research kind of guy. A lot of journalists keep clippings of their work - I don’t have any of that. So everything I wrote in the book was from memory. Honestly, there isn’t much available before the digital era to refer online anyway - they were never archived. So, my memory was the only thing to rely upon,” Sanghvi says.
When Sanghvi decided to write the memoir, he had decided to keep it “good-natured”, not wanting to be passive-aggressive through the book. “The entire country was under lockdown and needed some cheer. I did leave out some things in the book to keep it positive,” he says.
He’s received some rave remarks about the book, which “astonishes” him. “I thought it might have a limited audience, maybe some people interested in journalism would read it. But I never thought it’ll become a bestseller,” he says.
While it may seem that Sanghvi has shared his personal, professional life and everything in between, however, he’s carefully kept his personal life private. “I never talk about my personal life, so I wouldn’t write about it either,” he says.
City connect
Vir Sanghvi has been a regular visitor of Bengaluru since 1983 and has seen the city change from being sleepy and quiet to become the traffic-jam capital that it is now. Bengaluru Oota Company, Manu Chandra’s restaurants, Olive Beach and Toast and Tonic, and the ever-famous Karavalli for chef Naren Thimmaiah’s Mangaluru cuisine.
In a tell-all book, Vir Sanghvi, who will be in Bengaluru on Wednesday, turns the gaze on himself, recounting memories from his childhood days and college years, while also giving an insider’s perspective on the politics and glamour of those times
