JS & The Times of my life by Jug Suraiya

Book Reviews Program is 10 books young and we have received a great response from all you bloggers! 🙂 Today, we cross this mark to introduce you to the eleventh book of this program. The author of this book is a famous columnist and journalist of India. We are giving away Jug Suraiya’s ‘JS & The Times of my life’ for review. This book is an account of his personal memoirs at various stages of his life. Read the excerpt below to know what this book offers.

We are giving away 10 signed copies of Jug Suraiya’s book, ‘JS & The Times of my life’—A worm’s eye view of Indian journalism.

Here’s the engrossing excerpt:

‘I never wanted to be a journalist,’ says Jug Suraiya at the beginning of this book. However, by accident rather than design, for the past forty-odd years—and they’ve been very odd indeed—he’s found himself on the fringes of that profession.

Set against the backdrop of two iconic publications—the JS, ‘The magazine that thinks young,’ and The Times of India—the author recounts his tale of many misadventures: being shot at by a medley of Bengali holiday-makers in Hazaribagh whose Rabindrasangeet soiree he disrupted; encountering a bikini-clad Female Eunuch in Calcutta’s Grand Hotel; meeting Mother Teresa in her Home for Dying Destitutes and trying to guess how much she weighed; pretending to be the Maharajah of Malabar to gain entry into a tycoon’s stronghold; covering the filming of Dev Anand’s Hare Rama, Hare Krishna in Kathmandu; watching in fascinated horror as the resident bull of LPN II tried to roger his newly-bought Maruti 800; traveling incognito through Tibet with a French fruitcake; journeying across the world with the Tennis Elbow Club International; and, as he puts it, generally making a ‘career of pissing off’ everyone from Amitabh Bachchan to Jayalalithaa, Shobhaa De and many fans of Vikram Seth.

The chapters in this book are told in the same voice as his regular columns. The characters they describe—some well-known to us, some not—will remain immortal in our minds.

Know the author: Jug Suraiya is a journalist with The Times of India. He began his writing career first with the iconic Junior Statesman. His memories—both humorous and nostalgic—pepper the pages of this unforgettable book by a writer who has been described by Khushwant Singh as ‘India’s Art Buchwald’.

The review should be of 500+ words and should be posted on your blog within 7 days from the day you receive the book. In your review, tell us about the story, the writing style of the author, main characters, their description, your likes, dislikes, expectations, etc.

To be among the 10 people to review this book, you need to be a registered member of BlogAdda and your blog should be submitted & approved by BlogAdda. You should also have signed up for this program. If you have already signed up then head over to let us know your interest in reviewing this book.

NOTE: Even if you have signed up for the book reviews program, you need to individually apply for reviewing every book that you are interested in.

We have received an overwhelming response for this and the applications have now been closed. 🙂