Hers has been an exceptional life. As a child of less than four years, she was displaced by Partition from a Lahore engulfed in flames. Rai...
Hers has been an exceptional life. As a child of less than four years, she was displaced by Partition from a Lahore engulfed in flames. Raised in Delhi, Madhu Bhaduri went on to study and then teach philosophy in Delhi University. She then became one of India’s early women diplomats, pursued in what was still an unapologetically male-dominated vocation a vibrant and distinguished career.
This took her to countries during important moments of historical transition and upheaval, like Vietnam after the war with the United States, and countries that broke away from the former Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She nurtured through all of this a love of philosophy, music and literature, and is a noted Hindi novelist. After she retired, she joined the movement for the right to information, and even had a brief but stormy stint as a member of the Aam Aadmi Party.
All of this would, by itself, have made Madhu’s memoir Lived Stories compelling. But she also writes in supple fluid prose, with economy, grace, humour, sensitive human observation and astute political insights. Hers is a book of vignettes, fragmented memories; each “lived story” is related with the skill of the novelist that she is. Each...
