Introduction

The idea of writing down an autobiography came to me last year when Pakistan celebrated its 75^th Birthday on 14 August 2022. I realized that it was my 75^th birthday year as well and I and my country had grown together year after year, through thick and thin as they say, living through a great many memories. I thought that perhaps I could share some of these memories of myself and my country while I was able to do so. This book is really therefore two books in one: my life and my country’s life, flowing concurrently together.

Everybody’s life is full of anecdotes, of events and of stories, both good and bad, happy and sad. All of us have encountered people who continuously talk about themselves, indeed they talk about nothing else until one gets sick of it. How to write one’s life story without making people feel miserable? But at least the good thing about a book is that one can put it aside if one doesn’t like it, indeed throw it out of the room if one wants to. That is my excuse.

Our world has changed more in the last one hundred and fifty years than it did in the six thousand years since the dawn of civilization. Every decade since then, the change has been faster than ever before. The lives of people in the eighteenth century were not much different from what they might have been, say, in the first century. Our lives, on the other hand, are radically different from what they were only fifty years ago, before the start of ‘digital revolution’. My children have very little idea of how their parents used to cook, travel, play games, entertain, calculate or generally lived their lives. In the following pages you would see a glimpse of those times, a way of living, a civilization in fact, now gone forever.

I found my children and other young people knowing little about our country’s history. Whatever is found in the text books is either too cursory or pedantic, and human touch is missing. There are of course a large number of scholarly books available but then there would be few young people who would venture to go out and read them. May be the snippets of history that follow in this book would make them more knowledgeable about our past and how we have evolved into the present.

I must admit that all the autobiographies that one comes across are written by great people: statesmen, diplomats, scientists, men of literature: people who have distinguished themselves in some way in their chosen field. I on the other hand cannot lay claim to any distinction. How dare then that I chose to try my hand at writing my biography.

I took heart from the name of a political party launched by Arvind Kejriwal in India in 2012 – Aam Aadmi Party -, meaning common man’s party. AAP is currently the ruling party in Delhi and Punjab. I have always considered myself as a typical aam aadmi and wondered that if AAP could be successful in winning the hearts of its electors, I too could try to do the same with my readers. Grand thoughts, of course.