Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s wife Gursharan Kaur and Khushwant Singh at the book release in New Delhi on Monday. Picture by Prem Singh

New Delhi, Aug 16: Gursharan Kaur is a habitual gatecrasher but her husband Manmohan Singh is India’s best Prime Minister, better even than Jawaharlal Nehru who was guilty of nepotism.

That’s “Absolute Khushwant”. The grand old man of Indian journalism, 95 as of Sunday, August 15, released his latest work here this evening, taking a pot shot at the Prime Minister’s wife for coming to the programme un-invited (“as usual, I did not invite her but she always comes to my programmes”) but sent her off with the advice that she read a page in the book where he rates Manmohan Singh as the finest.

Absolute Khushwant: The Low-Down on Life, Death and Most things In-between is written in association with Humra Quraishi. It packs within its pages reminiscences, anecdotes and comment from the author’s 60-plus years as writer, editor and journalist. He ruminates about life as he contemplates death without fear. And he narrates from experience bluntly and, as is his wont, simply because “I tell no lies”.

In a rare appearance — he has told his friends that he does not want to attend public events any more — Khushwant Singh did not speak beyond the advice he gave the Prime Minister’s wife. He refused to take the dais, preferring to sit next to Gursharan in the front row instead as if he were an invitee to his own book release, and when he was presented with a large cake that the publishers (Penguin) arranged, he was really quite shy about cutting it.

It was left to M.J. Akbar, former editor of The Telegraph, who described himself as a protégé of Khushwant, to do the honours and speak for a generation of journalists and writers who were groomed by the man “who is absolutely incapable of malice”.

Akbar was a greenhorn in the early 1970s in Bombay when “Sir” — as he addresses Khushwant Singh — made a journalist and a writer out of him, teaching him that “while words were important it was more important not to fall in love with words”.

Get yourself out of the way, Khushwant Singh told Akbar and his colleagues as they reported stories. “Because journalism is more about communicating and less about writing,” recalled Akbar.

What kind of branding, wondered Akbar, did it take for someone as self-effacing as Khushwant Singh to build up a reputation as a man who drank a lot (he takes only two pegs of Scotch) and was garrulous and malicious. “Your covers are a lie, Sir,” Akbar told him as Khushwant heard him impassively.

Akbar recalled how Khushwant Singh reacted with outrage to the killings of Sikhs in 1984 and to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and upheld a journalism of values. Akbar thanked Khushwant Singh for making a writer out of him “however badly I might write” and Aveek Sarkar, the editor of The Telegraph, who was also at the function, for making an editor out of him “however badly I might edit”.

Humra Quraishi, who described Khushwant Singh as “the oldest working journalist in this part of the world”, said she found him a caring and traditionally conservative person as they worked on the book.