JOIN USMamata to pen memoirs
Slated for release in August, the book with interesting anecdotes from her personal and professional life promises to endear the persona of Mamata, sources close to the publishing house say.
“It is an attempt to look at myself in a different light, to come face to face with another me, to rediscover my other self,” says the Trinamool Congress chief.
“A book full of personal anecdotes and family details, her early years as a politician are interesting as they are a candid account of how a girl from middle-class moorings suddenly got thrown into the deep end of regional and national politics,” sources said.
The book will have a mention of her first trip abroad to Kuala Lampur where she was in for a shock after realising that there was nobody to receive her at the airport. Mamata, in the book, also shares how she made friendship with a Thai girl in the Malaysian capital.
Equally interesting are the details about her first trip to the United States where she bought chapsticks as gifts for her family back home thinking she was buying lipsticks.
Apart from her struggle as a young member of the Youth Congress to a leader of the masses, the memoirs show a different side of her persona than the firebrand leader the country knows her to be.
“(The book) has details of her early years where she was always a serious student in school and the financial difficulties the family had to face after her father’s untimely death; her election in the students union and then as member of the Youth Congress where she was always encouraged and given new responsibilities by Rajiv Gandhi; her expulsion from the party and formation of the Trinamool Congress,” the publishing house maintains.