Oscar Wilde, the most brilliant of the English wits, famously remarked ‘A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.’ That may be more appropriate while describing faces but it may as well reveal something about the focus of autobiographies, if such a venture was contemplated.
‘An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived’, said Herbert Samuel. So it becomes, at best, a presentable perception of one’s deeds in life, which will always have an element of fiction. It also becomes a disguised and implicit admission of the inadequacies and disappointments of life, couched of course, appropriately and cleverly.
And some may be overly zealous of protecting their privacy, and writing an autobiography honestly becomes the sure way to reveal one’s secrets and hidden aspects of life. Stephen Hawkins, the great scientist and thinker used to say ,’I don’t want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.’ Well, that may be a view point, but there are many who would lovingly like to indulge in this ‘self-deception’ and may find the venture of writing a love letter to themselves not only exciting but even fulfilling.
And while writing an autobiography may be the most respectable form of lying, the temptation is overwhelming. Two serious constraints however, impede and dampen this venture. One, for sure, is the limits of your creativity as lying is perhaps one of the best yet intractable forms of arts, and craft if you may please. But the more daunting challenge remains, as the famous W.H. Auden put it,’Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self”. It is this latter aspect, which while providing an inspiration, also turns it taxing and demanding. Pretenses are seldom easy to sustain.
And yet the idea is alluring. Particularly, if you happen to have a larger than life view of your self. Maya Angelou believed,’Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass – the slave narrative – speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying ‘I,’ meaning ‘we.’ Succumbing to self-praise and claiming to speak for others, is so utterly delicious.
Now after having dwelt on rather irrelevant aspects of the subject, I must indeed address as to what would I indeed do if I were to write an autobiography. To be a civil servant was a call of choice. And I have imbued with full sincerity the idiosyncrasies of a civil servant. One among them is what Alan Clark defined,’Give a civil servant a good case and he’ll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives, and convoluted apology.’ So if the autobiography turns out to be a translation though much voluminous, of the above definition, it should stand to my credit enviably,
Winston Churchill is reported to have remarked,’After a time, civil servants tend to become no longer servants and no longer civil’. I stoutly refute this statement. But I cannot refute the fact that I am trained to be following a rut and be as unimaginative and un-original as I can, and possibly as insipid and colorless as well. I have, therefore, found it prudent and practical to follow what ChatGPT may perhaps suggest how an autobiography should be structured.
It should begin with a chapter on Childhood and Early life and since I am educated, I must talk about how my education shaped my personality, attitudes, biases and prejudices. This chapter will offer me an opportunity of flaunting my Ivy League education and gloat about it.
Next few chapters must be devoted to my entering the Civil Service, because my brush with it over three decades and half ago, form the bulk of my perceived wisdom and presumed expertise. And as rest of my life, past the years of my active service, has been mostly a reflective exercise of this phase of my life, these chapters are likely to be the most voluminous. And no civil servant worth his salt can under- estimate his unprecedented contribution, a significant and most carefully crafted part of my autobiography will deal with my significant achievements, duly highlighting the formidable challenges and my unbending determination to overcome them. In other words, to talk about frontiers where I dared to venture while others waited in the wings.
Not to talk about my personal life and how adroitly I managed to strike a balance between career and family life, would be a serious omission. I must, therefore, talk eloquently about it.
And now that one is in the twilight years of one’s life, reflections of the past and offering unsolicited advise seems a good way of showing a continuing purpose of life. To what extent one will be able to overcome hypocrisy and hyperbole while doing so, is even for me, a matter of speculation.
And lastly, the most agonizing task will be to talk about a legacy, the toughest of a self-illusionary and often betraying temptation. But I am sure, a life -long training and practice of inventing imaginative contributions, shall carry the day for me.
I, therefore, propose the following scheme of chapters for my proposed autobiography.
1.Childhood and Early Life
2.Education and Career Aspirations
3.Entering the Civil Service
4.Early Years in the Civil Service
5.Key Experiences and Challenges
6.Making a Difference: Major Projects and Accomplishments
7.Balancing Work and Personal Life
8.Reflections and Lessons Learned
9.Looking Forward: Future Plans and Goals
10.Final Thoughts and Legacy.
Notwithstanding a somewhat cynical but realistic approach to the serious matter of writing one’s autobiography, I resolutely believe that it is the evaluation of one’s legacy that should engage one’s energy and application the most. The sincerity and intensity of a human’s impact on those around her, is best reflected in the concern that she feels about how posterity is likely to judge her.
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