Wings of Fire An Autobiography

Preface

This might seem to disqualify me as his biographer, and I certainly had no notion of being one. One day, while speaking to him, I asked him if he had a message for young Indians. His message fascinated me. Later, I mustered the courage to ask him about his recollections so that I could pen them down before they were buried irretrievably under the sands of time. We had a long series of sittings late into the night and early under the fading stars of dawn-all somehow stolen from his very busy schedule of eighteen hours a day. The profundity and range of his ideas mesmerized me. He had tremendous vitality and obviously received immense pleasure from the world of ideas. His conversation was not always easy to follow, but was always fresh and stimulating. There were complexities, subtleties, and intriguing metaphors and subplots in his narrative, but gradually the unfolding of his brilliant mind took the form of a continuous discourse.