AT THE mere age of 28, when he was still a briefless barrister in Lahore, Khushwant Singh wrote his own death notice. Besides his grieving family, he left “a large number of friends and admirers”. Among the visitors to the residence were “several ministers, and justices of the high court”. He would have been shocked to know that, when he actually died, the president of India, Sonia Gandhi of the Congress party, Narendra Modi of the BJP and a broad selection of editors sent their condolences. For by then he had also written his own epitaph:Here lies one who spared neither man nor GodWaste not your tears on him, he was a sodFor 42 years, as editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India and then as a columnist for the Hindustan Times, Mr Singh seized India by the collar and shook it. His was the most unbuttoned voice in the whole English-language press. In the 1970s he turned the Illustrated from a drab ex-colonial publication into a racy, sexy must-read, filled with counter-cultural news from the West and bikini babes on Goan beaches. Over his nine-year tenure circulation soared from 60,000 to...
from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1dV6JFD
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