A HALF-OPEN WINDOW
An honest critique of former vice-president Mohammad Hamid Ansari’s autobiography, By Many a Happy Accident, is difficult.
There is, in our society, no tradition for clinical criticism. Instead, we have a culture of literary appreciation—polite and deferential. In this culture, my personal equation with Hamid , one of warmth, cannot but intervene. Even so, reading the book, a question formed itself in, in full form, when he had the universe in his ken, analytical and penetrating, in his ample drawing rooms in Kabul, Tehran or New York.
