As per the blurb on the front inside flap of the dustcover of this book, this is the autobiography of ‘an extraordinary man who ushered in the paperback revolution in India’. Having known the author personally, and having scanned the book, my thoughts revert to a saying—“ All autobiographies are apologies or certificates given by authors to themselves.” Well this book proves the point.

Although I have lived most my life with books—reading them, looking after them, writing them, buying and selling them, and even publishing them, I am happy to acknowledge that the author of this book is ‘guilty’ of having brought me into the ‘trade’. His sermons on the profession turned my head so far that I still refuse to treat books as mere merchandise and ‘flog’ them for whatever I can get for them.

            Dina Nath Malhotra is the politician of the Indic publishing world: He, with the help and co-operation of some like-minded Delhi-wallas brought the publishing-trade from Bombay to Delhi, shifted the focus away from importers of foreign books to the native publishers; he was instrumental in setting up of the first voluntary all India body of publishers, i.e. Federation of Publishers and Booksellers of India, FPBA in short; gave it a constitution and launched it into a constitutional framework.

          I was the first Executive secretary of this august body. But then I was unceremoniously and ‘unconstitutionally’ removed from that post within 90 days. And when I cried for help, pleading foul play on the part of those elected officials who felt threatened by the constitutional functioning of the FPBA, Shri Malhotra was cool enough to pour cold water on my protestations. He calmly told me that “you don’t claim martyrdom for doing the right thing”.

        Luckily, I not only moved out of my ‘martyrdom syndrome’, I also left the country with a bleeding heart, wandered through 15 countries of Mid-East and Europe before landing in the UK seven months later and made a new life for myself and my family.

        But, lest this review becomes my own self-certificatory document, I must focus on the content of this book. It is a book of memoirs—personal memoirs, searching for glorification of one’s antecedents and laying the plinth on which one hopes to lay one’s own bust for the gratification of one’s own admirers and for the wayward drunkards to sit at the bottom of and rest their backs on.

        I can’t help but notice that this search for glory, in this thatch-pile of selected anecdotes is such a lonely search. I have not noticed the presence of any fellow travellers, any colleagues, or any ‘friends, philosophers and guides’ lighting the author’s path, or even any competent successors being groomed and trained to carry the flame forward.

        I also could not help noticing that the author has failed to acknowledge the inspirational debt of those who helped him to rise above the crowd in his tide to glory—people like the MD of M. Seshachalam & Co. in Madras, Mr M.N.Rao for providing him with the marketing template for his Home Library Scheme on which his ‘paperback revolution’ took a ride; or people like Artur Isenberg (the then representative of the Ford Foundation in India for promoting ‘Dinu’, as DNM came to be known, for his incarnation as ‘the doyen of Indian publishing’ industry; or even major authors like R.K.Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Nayan Tara Sahgal  Amrita Pritam and Acharya Chatursen who fell under his spell to launch the ‘paperback revolution’).

        The author fails to register the facts of his signal failure as a builder of ‘publishing assets’—respecting the authors’ rights, nurturing the writers and building up their status, training in-house good copy-editors, developing book-packaging and book-marketing techniques suitable for a poor and semi-literate country like India, improving the technology of book-parcelling and paying good and honest wages to his workforce so as to retain them, to reward and nurture their loyalty.

        With the result that today, though his ‘publishing house is in fourth generation’ there are hardly any symbols of glory decorating its walls: great and good authors have abandoned the ship; management is keener on making money by printing whatever will sell to Anglicised career-seekers of India; Saraswati Vihar, declared to be ‘a place of worship for authors and would-be publishers’ stands deserted.

        My search for the truth of authors’ glory having been exhausted, I turn to the book itself: by any standards of book-production, this is a badly produced book and does no credit to either the author or the publisher—the ‘third-generation doyen’ of this fallen empire—poor quality paper; poorer binding; no photographs of the author illustrating his association with the heroes of his day; no word-index at the end; no acknowledgements of gratitude to any personages for having played any role in the life of this ‘lone wager of revolutions’.

        Pity is that, as another reviewer has already pointed out, this august publishing house could not even find a decent copy editor before putting the book through print. Result is that, for example, in the episode of Muslim outrage at the publication of the pamphlet Rangeela Rasool, threats are being ‘given’ against the life of late Shri Rajpal and not being ‘made’ as they normally are in English.

―Shreeram Vidyarthi