What could possibly be the case for a biography of my father, who retired as a deputy secretary in the Government of Rajasthan in 1976 and was barely known outside his own state? I believe I owe the reader an answer to this question at the outset.

First and foremost, the generation born during the 1920s, to which my father belonged, was a special one. It straddled pre- and post-Independence India in a way like no other. It was too young to be at the forefront of the freedom movement, and yet old enough to be inspired by its foremost leader, Mahatma Gandhi, and to join him in his endeavours. Importantly, it was also a generation that came of age just as India was becoming independent and was thus positioned just right to help build the country post Independence. Born in 1921, my father was twenty-six years old at the time of Independence. Therefore, he witnessed Mahatma Gandhi lead India to independence from the British during the formative years of his life and still had many years ahead of him to help build a new nation. Did he rise to the occasion? I will explore this in my book.

India is a vast country; a few well-known national political figures and handful of distinguished members of the civil service in the central government alone could not have built it. Ultimately, the country was the sum of its constituent states, and each state had to be shaped and built. What role did ordinary citizens like my father play in building their states? In many states, the local political leadership was not fully equipped to govern them. At the same time, the number of officers helping run the state governments was small. Those facts empowered even junior officers to exert influence on outcomes. If they were able and motivated to promote the public interest, as my father was, they could influence outcomes in ways that could contribute to the welfare of many generations to come.

The lives of ordinary citizens can also provide a window to the social, cultural and political ethos of their times. What was life like for ordinary citizens in rural India of the 1920s and 1930s? What opportunities existed for them? How did they relate to the national movement, in which Mahatma Gandhi had tried to involve every Indian in one way or the other?

Apart from these considerations, my father's life would likely interest and, indeed, inspire many young readers, simply because of its unique trajectory. He was born in a remote village in Rajasthan, in a family so poor that it could not scrape together two square meals a day. The village did not have even a primary school until after he was twenty-one years old. He lost his father at the age of five. At fourteen, he lost his mother. What are the odds that a young man with this history would manage to land up in Jaipur at twenty-five years to serve on the editorial board of Lokvani, the only newspaper in the city, so that he could fulfil his desire to contribute to the freedom movement as it approached its logical conclusion? And who could have predicted that two of his sons would become so successful that the President of India would honour them with Padma awards, one with the Padma Shri and the other with the Padma Bhushan? Yet, that in a nutshell is my father's story.

I confess that I began this work as my own autobiography. I had known of the extreme hardships my father had faced during his early life from a short autobiography that he had written for circulation among family members. My plan was to include this family background in my autobiography. Therefore, I began with a chapter on my grandmother, whom I had never seen but who had greatly fascinated me from the bit I read about her in Father's autobiography. After completing the chapter on her, I began the second chapter, which was on my father. I had expected to summarize a few key facts of his life in twenty or twenty-five pages and then turn to my own. But as I progressed, this second chapter kept getting longer and longer, until I realized that the document was turning into my father's biography. At that point, I also realized that the story of my father's life was infinitely more interesting than my own. The result of that realization is this volume in the reader's hands.

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