My Years with Rajiv - Triumph and tragedy

On 21 May 1991, Wajahat Habibullah, then the commissioner of Kashmir (constituting the valley and the two districts of Ladakh), had returned home after inspecting a mysterious fire at Dalgate, Srinagar. Much to his dismay, there had been another fire, one that left him devastated: an RDX explosion in the south Indian town of Sriperumbudur had taken the life of India-s sixth prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi.My Years with Rajiv is an endearing account of a friendship that turned into an administrative partnership, one that gave Habibullah an acute insight into Rajiv Gandhi-s political life. But equally, in this lucid memoir, recounting his years in the Indian Administrative Service, particularly at the Prime Minister-s Office, he walks us through the last three decades of the twentieth century-in many ways, the most formative years of Indian history.