Lord Robbins

Lord Robbins WHY does one write an autobiography? There may be several reasons. One may find at one stage of one's life that the vicissitudes that it had gone through represent a series of experiments, with varying degrees of success or failure; one feels an urge to leave a record of these experiments behind for posterity to profit by. Gandhi's autobiography falls tinder this category. It may be also that one's life is a long struggle against misery and squalor leading in the end to success of a spectacular order. And one feels an urge to put on record how, given the will, man's genius can rise above wordly obstacles and compel society to the recognition that is its due. Chaplin's is such a success story, a romance as exhilarating as it is reassuring. Or again one may be the author of discoveries in science or philosophy so pervasive as to change man's mode of appreciation of the universe, and one may be impelled to unfold the inner processes of thought and the provocations that they experienced, for the world to have a more intimate knowledge of the spirit of adventure that led to these discoveries. One may refer to James Watson's "The Double Helix" as one such endeavour in recent years. It may also happen that big changes take place in the life of a nation, and one finds oneself, as did Nehru, at the centre of the scene, shaping events in a substantial way. One's life story then becomes a document for later historians to build on.