`Indira always yearned for a daughter, felt depressed in 1981`

New Delhi: Blessed with two sons, Indira Gandhi, however, always yearned for a daughter."My heart has always yearned for a daughter, so I can imagine your joy in Jagat`s having a baby sister," Gandhi wrote to former diplomat K Natwar Singh, congratulating him on having a daughter.

The letter by Gandhi is among several by the former prime minister to Singh, published by the former diplomat, author and parliamentarian in a new book. Brought out by Rupa, the 206-page book "Yours Sincerely, K Natwar Singh" also contains letters Singh wrote to and received from E M Forster, Rajaji, Lord Mountbatten, Dalai Lama, President Nyerere, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, M F Husain, Rajiv Gandhi, R K Narayan, Nargis Dutt and Dev Anand among many others. In another letter written in 1981, Gandhi wrote she felt depressed and isolated by the widespread cynicism, hypocrisy and hatred. "I have read some of the interviews in the book you left and I am depressed," she wrote. "I feel isolated, not because of policies, the correctness of which will be seen in time as it has been before. But while the earth spins on the beauty and with method, the world of men is a hollow one, where words have no meaning and sentiments, no feeling, the young have lost wonder, elan and even hope. Can a flame of idealism or a vision of a better man be protected from all this cynicism, hypocrisy and hatred?" she wrote to the author. A year before she clamped emergency, Gandhi had written to Singh that she was engrossed in the domestic scene which was extremely unpleasant and full of dangerous portents for "our democracy and for all the ideals for which India had stood" and which she had espoused in international forums. In 1980, after her re-election she wrote that the campaign was tough and hectic. "The real problems begin now. The economy is in a mess and beyond our border the dark clouds of cold war have gathered with rumblings of worst to come". Apparently keen that a book be written on the Nehru family Gandhi in one of the letters wrote, "I have been speaking of the Nehru saga for long time. The great thing about the Nehru family is not the emergence of two or three famous individuals but that the large number of cousins were all distinctive in one way or another. Not only were most of them formidable characters but the women they married also were strong personalities. It would indeed make an interesting and absorbing saga." On April 14, 1975, in another letter saying that she had given in to a part of Morarji`s demand about the Gujarat elections, Gandhi wrote "Our difficulties are acute and varied enough without having a dead Morarji haunting the scene. "It seemed such a silly point for which to fast or for us to hold out, since the difference in dates was only three months." For some strange reason he got on exceptionally well with older women, says Singh in the prefatory note listing Gandhi, Vijayalakshmi Pandit among these, as he recalls the `grace and gravitas` of Gandhi and Pandit`s `staggering candour`. So you have Indira Gandhi writing a `get well soon` letter to Singh who was down with a slipped disk and recalling how K P S Menon, with a slipped disk had to stand in a very artistic Ajanta pose for quite some time! Unhappy over the diminishing practice of letter writing, Singh quotes Blaise Pascal "I am sorry to have wearied you with so long a letter but I did not have a time to write you a shorter - to rue the assault on the refinement of language by SMS that he says has invented a pidgin, linguistic short hand along with the ubiquitous TV that has so far not killed the book or the newspaper but poses great danger to both." Has writing letters become a tertiary literary activity? "Our indifference to history and historical process spills over to not preserving letters," Singh says and adds that although as people Indians are not given to preserving letters although there are exceptions. Nehru was a good example and Mahatma Gandhi wrote thousands of letters. Tolstoy`s selected works run into ninety volumes out of which 32 carry the letters written and received by him. PTI