Srinagar, March 16 -- The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Karan Singh (Speaking Tiger Books), by Harbans Singh, offers an eye-opening view of a biographical project that seeks to strike a balance between admiration and analysis, access and independence, and narrative and documentary.The manuscript, including a copy of the cover, internal proofs, chapters, and final considerations, permits a substantive academic evaluation of both the life under narration and the narration style. They also reveal the implicit contradictions of the official biography, a genre that in India has vacillated between celebration and disavowal.The materials indicate a work of great ambition, and also ask what the limits to proximity are, what is the danger of na...