CERTAINLY MORE THAN A MEMOIR

Gurcharan Das has been a story teller since his youth, pontificating in spells on a young nation free of socialist shackles racing to find its space in the sun, be it in India Unbound or India Grows at Night. An octogenarian now, he looks back at his own life, and in the process offers a more intimate and critical account of India since the partition

- Madhumita Chakraborty

THE WRITER Gurcharan Das had actually evolved long before the corporate honcho or even the "classical liberal" as he likes to call himself. The eponymous The Three Plays, a compilation of the historical play Larins Sahib, along with Mira and 9 Jakhoo Hill, were published when the author was still in his twenties.

He has since, as he writes in his memoir, Another Sort of Freedom, sold Vicks vaporub in the dusty towns of India, rising to be Managing Director of the US-based multinational Procter & Gamble (P&G), before plunging fulltime into the defence of liberalism.

Gurcharan Das took "early retirement" from Procter & Gamble and returned to India in 1991 to "sell" the economic reforms that had been ushered in by a government headed by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. He shot off a letter to Union finance minister Manmohan Singh and two newspaper editors he wished to write for from the P&G headquarters in Cincinnati, before taking another drastic right turn in his life. The author had swerved drastically from his track before, switching to majoring in philosophy from engineering at Harvard University and then equipped with that lofty degree to stoop to selling Vicks vaporub in India.