This book is a gem, particularly if you were just starting to figure out that a lot of what you were made to read in your school text-books was a bunch of lies.
Kuldip Nayar's career it turns out, is pretty much the stuff of legends. His lengthy journalistic career stretches from the days of partition almost 60 years ago, to the bus diplomacy era during Prime Minister Vajpayee's stewardship of India-Pakistan relations in 1999.
Indeed, reading Scoop! is like going through a refresher course in Indian history, and Kuldip Nayar writes with a clarity and humility that has characterised his public life in the last few years.
It's been a few days since I finished reading it, during one of those typical muggy September afternoons, but a few chapters readily spring to mind.
Like the very first one about Mahatma Gandhi's assassination - Nayar writes of how after paying respects to Gandhi as he lay in Birla House, he couldn't write the report. "I had so much to say but I could not even hold my hands steady, let alone putting my fingers together to hold the pen. Some of the words were not legible because my tears smudged them."
Later Nayar writes of how "the editor called me the following morning, not to admonish me but to tell me that objectivity was one of the cardinal principles of journalism."
What follows this chapter are others in which Nayar throws light on many under-reported but era-defining events - how the boundary between Pakistan and India was drawn, Lal Bahadrur Shastri's mysterious death in Tashkent (Nayar was there) and so on.
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Many of these passages contain advice to journalists. Nayar writes of how he unwittingly becomes a tool in the fight for succession after Nehru's death. "Had I helped Shastri unwittingly?
This thought nagged me then and still does. It seemed to me that my story had hurt Morarji and benefited Shastri's image."
Nayar also fills a few gaps in our understanding of the events that led to the 1965 war, and the Emergency years.
One notable chapter deals with how the father of Pakistan's N-bomb A Q Khan, was trapped into admitting that they were a nuclear state. "I thought I would provoke him; egoist that he was, he might fall for the bait. He did. I concocted a story...Khan hit the roof and became pounding the table: 'Tell them we have it, we have it.'...thus Khan said what he should have withheld."
Nayar's book is a slim volume, well worth your time and money.
About the Reviewer: H R Venkatesh is a news anchor at CNN-IBN. He maintains his blog here.
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