BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 30TH JANUARY, 2021

BY MANY A HAPPY ACCIDENT: 
RECOLLECTIONS OF A LIFE

ABOUT THE BOOK

Fortuitous or not, By Many a Happy Accident is an account of a life of unplanned happenings that took M. Hamid Ansari away from his preferred fancy for academia to professional diplomacy and then be co-opted in public life and catapulted to the second highest office in the land for two consecutive terms. None of his predecessors, except Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, had experienced this honour.

Besides chairing the Rajya Sabha and shedding interesting light on some of its functional aspects, Ansari used the vice presidency as a formidable pulpit to express himself candidly on a range of issues at different times in India’s changing political landscape.

Their overarching theme was the need for modern India to re-commit itself to the constitutional principles of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, to the values of a composite culture, and for correctives in polity relating to identity, security and empowerment of the weaker segments of our society.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
M. Hamid Ansari is the Vice President of India and Chairman, Rajya Sabha since August 2007. He is the only person to be elected to this high office for two consecutive terms since Dr S. Radhakrishnan. In a diplomatic career spanning four decades, he served as India’s Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as High Commissioner to Australia and Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations in New York. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Centre of West Asian and African Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the Academy for Third World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia; Vice Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University; and Chairman of India’s National Commission for Minorities.

M. Hamid Ansari is the author of Travelling Through Conflict: Essays in the Politics of West Asia (2008) and edited Iran Today: Twenty-Five Years After the Islamic Revolution (2005).
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