‘Ajay and His Tales from Faraway Lands’ is the classic example of a globe-trotter translating his real life experiences into fiction. Normally we regale when we find reality taken out of the pages of a drama or a tale, but Amitava Chaudhuri revels in doing just the opposite. Quite close to life, each one of his stories makes a fascinating reading. Oft times, one finds him in the garb of the chief character of his story, mixing merrily with locals in every station of their life and in the natural environment of their being.
I am also fascinated by the huge landscape his stories cover from the most advanced countries of the world in the west to the least developed ones in Africa, where he has been on critically important assignments, official and private, national and international, as an industrial expert.
The author of these tales seems to have an extraordinary ability to relate to all cultures, religions and ethnicities with equal ease. He is equally at home in war torn South Sudan as he is in the pristine glory of the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. He works seamlessly alike with Ministers of a government and with the man on the street. People confide in him across civilizations. Quite unaware of the dangers involved, he plunges into conflict zones in Iraq and South Sudan, at times having had to hide himself from rocket attacks in the former and stray bullets in the latter. One finds him operating easily in the post conflict regions too, like in Rwanda and Ethiopia.
At the very basic level he connects with animals such as the gorilla and those who work with them in the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. He even seems to try and connect inadvertently with the Kalahari lions, narrowly escaping disastrous consequences.
As a diplomat and a writer, I deeply admire not only Mr. Chaudhuri’s penchant to have worked extremely successfully across diverse nations and cultures of the world, but also his rare gift of mirroring his life’s varied experiences through his ‘Ajay and His Tales from Faraway Lands’.
I wish the author all success.
Ambassador Lakhan Mehrotra.
Formerly Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Africa, and United Nations Envoy in Cambodia and Indonesia.