Decorated with Padma Vibhushan, the country’s second highest civilian honor, Khushwant Singh was a prolific writer, lover of poetry and founder editor of Yojana, a government journal, and editor of Illustrated Weekly of India, National Herald and the Hindustan Times and several literary and news magazines in the seventies and eighties.

In pre-Independence India, Khushwant (Khushal) was born to Sir Sobha Singh, a prominent civil contractor who built the Lutyen’s Delhi, in the province of Punjab (now in Pakistan) in a small village called Hadali.

Tired of being teased by boys Khushal changed his name to Khushwant and his life began with his education at Modern School situated at Chandni Chowk in New Delhi followed by Government College, Lahore, St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and later the King’s College London.

As Khushwant grew to be a talkative young man his father thought it apt to enroll him for a lawyer’s course at the Inner Temple, England, which he managed to complete in five instead of three years. Of his won admittance Khushwant could never get too interested in academics and would barely manage to pass.

In 1938 his professional life started as a practicing lawyer at Lahore Court and lasted for eight years.

Unable to find excitement in his choice of career and after rejecting Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s offer to be a High Court Judge in Pakistan, he took up the position of Information Officer for the Government of India in Toronto, Canada and later as Press Attaché and Public Officer for the Indian High Commission for four years in London and Ottawa.

Then in 1951 began the life long journey and affair with the world of writing when he was employed as a journalist in the All India Radio and from 1954 and 1956 served at the Department of Mass Communications of UNESCO at Paris.

However, in 1956 his instatement as an editor brought a definite stability to his career and was responsible for raising the circulation of The Illustrated Weekly, a significant newsweekly, from 65,000 to 400,000.

But in 1978 when just a week before his retirement Khushwant was asked to go on leave “with immediate effect,” the circulation dropped drastically.

Khushwant had qualities that differentiated him from one and all and he was fiercely honest and regardless of any inhibition spoke what he felt was right, often taking on the high and nigh from religious, social and public spheres and many a times to the detriment of his own interests.

In public life he faced scathing criticism for being an “establishment liberal” as he stood by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, even during emergency days (1975-76) when she gagged the media and then supported her son Sanjay Gandhi and daughter-in-law, Menaka Gandhi only to fall out with the latter at a later date.

But despite his agnostic self he derived a deep sense of belonging to the Sikh community and his strong faith in democratic principles led him to oppose the Indira government that effected Operation Bluestar, a military drive to flush out militants hiding in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and returned the Padma Bhushan in protest.

Post-anti-Sikh carnage of 1984 which followed Indira’s assassination he pursued for legal justice for the Sikhs despite knowing the knowledge that many Congress leaders were part of the pogrom.

It did not matter to him that it was the Congress that had nominated him as member of the Rajya Sabha for 1980-86 tenure, or that Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale, the Sikh separatist, could get him eliminated.

He is the one to have lived his life fully and with strict discipline.

All his life, he woke up at 4 am, scribbled his columns by hand, enjoyed his noon siesta, exercised well, savored a peg or two of single malt in the evening, cherished women company and retired to bed at 10 p.m. sharp.

His works ranged from political analysis, satire, chronicles, translations of Sikh religious texts, Urdu poetry, essays, anecdotes, profiles and anthologies, and spare.

A few of his works from a prolific collection, read by more than three generations of readers, are The Mark of Vishnu; The History of Sikhs; Train to Pakistan (a 1956 classic); I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale; The Sikhs Today; The Fall of the Kingdom of the Punjab; A History of the Sikhs; Ranjit Singh: The Maharajah of the Punjab; Ghadar 1915: India’s First Armed Revolution; Delhi: A Novel; Sex, Scotch and Scholarship: Selected Writings; Not a Nice Man to Know: The Best of Khushwant Singh; We Indians; Women and Men in My Life; Uncertain Liaisons; Sex, Strife and Togetherness in Urban India; The Company of Women; Truth, Love and a Little Malice; With Malice towards One and All; The End of India; The Sunset Club; Agnostic Khushwant Singh; There is No God; Khushwantnama: The Lessons of my Life; and The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (2013).

When asked of his favorite book, without batting an eyelid Khushwant would mention Portrait of A Lady, a pen-profile of his beloved grandmother.

He was particularly close to her as his eyes would fill with tears on recounting how she would narrate stories to a young Khushwant whenever he needed affection and morale boost and perhaps this planted the germ of love for writing in him.

No friendships, associations, relations or sense of authority could blunt his wicked jokes, risqué remarks, sensational outpourings, colored in the sub-continental hue, and all of this lent a showman status to his image.

His wife, Kawal Malik, also a Modernite, and they had a son, Rahul Singh (a noted editor and author), and a daughter, Mala. According to Rahul, his father’s talent of communicating his message right from the President down to peasants won for him the immense rapport and bonds he forged with readers and fellow workers.

The companionship with his pen outlasted the one with his wife, who died in 2001, and now the literary juggernaut has left for his own journey beyond this world peacefully in his sleep due to natural causes, lying on his bed in the very same apartment complex, the first one in the country, constructed by his father at Sujan Singh Park neighborhood in New Delhi.

“Here lies one who spared neither man nor God,
Waste not your tears on him, he was a sod.
Writing nasty things he regarded as great fun,
Thank the Lord he is dead, this son of a gun.”

— For one who believed in celebration of death he had written his epitaph when just 28-years-old.