Reads just like a novel.

"Oh, yes, I'm the great pretender
Pretending I'm living well
My need is such,
I pretend too much
I'm lonely but no one can tell."
(The Platters, Buck Ram)

I read Intimate Lies a couple of years back. It's the story of the F Scott Fitzgerald-Sheilah Graham liaison retold by her son. He wrote it a few years after her death to set the records straight. It reads rather like a novel, as a seasoned blurb writer would put it. robertwestbrook.com For all we know, it is a novel. Else, how do you explain the way he describes her state of mind at various times in her life as if he were living inside her head? Truth to tell, I don't mind. To me, all memoirs, history, biography and autobiography are pretence if not outright lies, at times unintentional. That's also why the so-called rewriting of history doesn't bother me. [You'll find The Great Pretender song lyrics at either of these websites: queenwords.com or persweb.direct.ca.]

Rub your eyes. Clap your hands.

Believe it or not, this happened in front of my eyes one night in the eighties. To begin at the beginning, though, back in the fifties, a lapsed chef and cooking stove salesman from the UK started his own agency in the US. He then went on to become a Legend and a best-selling author. His famous book spurred me on into advertising. Many years later, in the late eighties, I saw him making a massive nuisance of himself one night in the elevator of a posh Pune hotel. I was there for a seminar hosted by the ad agency I consulted with. The Legend was there for a similar reason and was trying to needle his Indian colleagues into making mincemeat of the agency I worked for – very, very loudly. I was the only odd man out in that elevator crammed with the Great Man and his team mates totally oblivious of me and my reason for being there. Fortunately for me, I must emphasize. Or, I may not be here to tell you the tale, who knows? But then you couldn’t really begrudge the Genius – and “the world’s best known advertising man” by his own insistence – his carefully cultivated and widely flaunted little eccentricities, could you? An amusing and beguiling capsule biography is here: http://www.gandalf.it/m/ogilvy2.htm.

Invasion with a mouth-watering flavour (Don’t armies march on their stomach?)

The Punjabi invasion of the Bombay palate began, if memory serves, just after independence. I recall going with my father and mother on a Saturday evening in 1949 for the opening of a small hotel behind Regal Cinema. It happened to be owned by one of his Irani or Iraqi clients. That was the first time I remember eating Tandoori Chicken and wondering aloud at the red colour sticking to the fingers. That was Punjab pandering to the local palate. The Chinese wave came later probably closer to the end of the fifties, if again memory serves, when eateries started springing up and non-Chinese restaurants began offering a few Chinese dishes as well. What brought about this trip down the gastronomic memory lane, I haven’t a clue. The city’s free-loading foodies too were much later in coming. I was recently told a story about one of the more enterprising members of this pioneering breed. The tale teller claims to have shared his table and paid for his nips and quarters at an aunty’s joint in the bad old days. His gift of the gab and survival instinct were so extraordinary, says his fellow-tippler and my informer, that he could cajole a drink and a meal from the most tight-fisted of his companions as well as the stoniest-hearted among the aunties. All of which reminds me of Jeffrey Bernard (Low Life & More Low Life, Pan Books). Of course, Bernard was a far superior writer than the Indian journalist I was told about although far less successful in worldly terms. A nutshell JB biography is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Bernard. Also, do check out the book review at http://www.eclectica.org/v7n4/mcgowin_bernard.html. To get a quick feel of the times when Napoleon’s armies were marching on their stomach, have a look at the Time Traveller’s Guide to Napoleon’s Empire at http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/guide18/part06.html.