Last December, as part of our annual cleanup of various things in the house, usually not my thing though, I was instructed by my wife to give away a few of my books because they were now piling up on the floor. How many, I asked. Start with the memoirs, she said.
I know why, 25 years ago I had written in an article, that it was a great pity that not enough former civil servants wrote their memoirs. After all, they were witnesses to, and participants in, some important events. But that once again proved an old saying: one must be careful what one wishes for. Since then, there has been a flood of bureaucratic memoirs.
I asked a publisher friend once about this and he rubbed his thumb on his forefinger. Fat advances, he said. Not all bureaucrats get handsome advances, of course. They have to be celebrities for that. That is, their last job before retirement should have been one that the media covered extensively. If it was two jobs, like say, first finance secretary and then RBI governor or first home secretary and then cabinet secretary, or first ambassador and then foreign secretary etc, the advances can be truly generous. This happens because of competition amongst publishers looking for a quick buck from what would, Inshallah, turn out to be a bestseller. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, after all, especially the publisher’s breast. Poor fellows are always keeping their fingers crossed because only one in a hundred books makes money.
Well, be that as it may, one must not complain, either at the good fortune of the bureaucrats or at their self-importance, even when a few have an abundance of both. The mitigating factor is that every little bit of formally recorded history helps in cross-checking versions. But what of the publishers? And this is where the twist in the tale lies because while you can take a bureaucrat out of the bureaucracy, you can’t take bureaucracy out of him or her. Their innate caution or overwhelming mediocrity, or as is often the case both, can rain on the publisher’s parade.
I am an avid reader of all sorts of memoirs, and have read over 100. I have even read a few unpublished ones. And I can say with confidence that 99 per cent of these books are, well, let’s just say totally disappointing. Even if you ignore the excessive ‘apre mois le deluge’ (French for ‘after me, deluge’) motif that runs through such books, most are a complete waste of the reader’s time and money. My heart bleeds for the publishers. I much prefer the autobiographies of business people, police officers, military personnel, doctors and other professionals. They tend to be less self- centred and more honest. Sadly, they rarely write their memoirs because publishers are only interested in the glamorous ones who held important pre-retirement posts. There is the odd exception, of course, but by and large this is the case.
It’s interesting to note here that journalists don’t write their memoirs. They, too, have a host of stories to tell, especially the TV journalists. Until 2020 I used to participate in budget-related TV shows and have some idea of how taxing their job is as a fly on the wall. They see and hear all sorts of things that I, at any rate, would love to read about. One classic story I heard a cameraman tell was about a rookie reporter and very well-known finance minister. The reporter, who was barely out of the teens, was dispatched to get a ‘bite,’ short for sound bite, or a quote. The reporter got the minister to say a few words and then asked, completely innocently, “Sir, what’s your name and what do you do? I have to tell the viewers.”