I do not know why Arun Shourie has not acknowledged the important fact that most of the articles collected in this volume first appeared in the Indian Express. In a very real sense, they were made possible because of his unique position in the Express chain. What¬ever may have happened later, the Express and Shourie shared a symbiotic relationship, manifest clearly in the series of advertisements put out by the chain after he had left. I hold no brief for the Express, but the interests of scholarship demand a different set of obligations.
With that off my chest, I am ready to announce that I am happy to have Mrs Gandhi’s Second Reign in my hands. It contains all the articles that made Shourie an overnight sensation: the famous and the not so famous, the readable and the unreadable, and the ones about hope which are indeed quite hopeless. Shourie appeared at the right time, at the right place: it is to his credit that he lost no opportu¬nity to ‘seize the day’, some¬thing that cannot be said of thousands of equally talented and intelligent individuals in similar situations.