There are books that speak. There are books that shout. And then there are books that sit beside you in silence — unhurried, unflinching, almost sacred in their stillness — until you realise the silence itself is speaking. Shahid Siddiqui’s I, Witness: India from Nehru to Narendra Modi (Rupa Publications) is one such book — part memoir, part moral meditation, part political mirror. At once a confession and a chronicle, it dares to do what journalism was once born to do: to remember.

The witness of a nation

Siddiqui was born in 1950 — the same year India was reborn as a republic. He grew up in Ballimaran, where Ghalib’s ghost still lingers in the lanes, and where the fragrance of attar mixes with the ache of Partition. He carries, in his writing, the rhythm of a people learning to walk

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