To Question or Not To Question? : That Is the Question

Deciding on a topic for this lecture has been problematic. As has been rightly said, Nikhil Chakravartty was a man of many parts. He was a warm and affectionate friend; he was curious about people, about politics and about the general ambience of the world we live in. There were some things we had in common – we both politely declined a Padma award. Nikhil maintained that it would interfere with his autonomy as a journalist, and I felt it would do the same to me as an academic. His occasional snippets of political gossip were always worth waiting for. I was thinking the other day that in the current spate of writing memoirs, had he written his, the TV channels would have exploded.