SY Quraishi insists his book is not a memoir. He is right; it is even better. Traditional autobiographies of public men in India tend to follow a predictable arc: hardship, struggle, ascent, vindication. Instead, Mr Quraishi offers a hundred select two-page episodes of his life — thoughtful, sometimes comic, often piercing — each carrying a learning from his years as a civil servant and later as chief election commissioner (CEC) of India.
Javed Akhtar, the distinguished screenwriter, lyricist and poet, puts it another way: “SY Quraishi has not written a memoir; he has written a hundred short films, each complete in itself, together forming a portrait of India that no single narrative could capture.”
Born on 11 June 1947, Mr Quraishi is among the last of the midnight’s children, with a personal stake in India’s journey after Independence. Three themes quietly recur across the episodes.
The first is about being a Muslim in India. His family had been rooted in Delhi’s walled city for five hundred years. They were a household of Islamic scholars, steeped in Arabic, Persian and the city’s older literary culture; yet, the atmosphere at home was strikingly liberal, with tradition and modernity blending without strain. Early episodes describe his passion for music — building guitars from scratch in the lanes of Daryaganj, playing in a beat group while the civil service interview hung over him, and then founding a rock band during IAS training. All this sits comfortably alongside a deep knowledge of Urdu and his family's 500-year-old traditions.
His childhood memories are of Hindu and Muslim families living in easy friendship, festival food crossing thresholds even after the rupture of Partition. The steady erosion of that harmony, especially in recent years, and the complications of being a highly competent Muslim bureaucrat, surface as a quiet anxiety. This is best demonstrated in him refusing a posting in the prime minister’s office (PMO) because he did not want his religion to become an additional file. He later joined a small group that met with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat to discuss rising insecurity among Muslims and the need for dialogue.
A second theme is the trajectory of the Election Commission of India (ECI) after TN Seshan gave it a new force and captured public imagination. Mr Quraishi’s documented efforts to widen participation include: celebration of National Voters’ Day to build awareness, taking enrolment to corporate offices and campuses, and a gender audit of electoral rolls that revealed the ‘missing millions’ of women missing from the lists, which helped female turnout climb from a chronic deficit towards parity and beyond. That record is both relevant and revealing at a time when the election machinery seems bent on deletions and the denial of voting rights.
Other striking efforts are the institutional expenditure monitoring mechanism and the insistence that impartiality of the Commission should be such that the opposition trusts it. In this context, the 2012 order to cover Mayawati’s publicly funded statues and elephant symbols in Uttar Pradesh, aimed at denying the incumbent an unfair advantage, ironically enough, came in for media criticism at that time.
The last dozen years have tested the ECI's independence and credibility more severely than any period since the Emergency. Mr Quraishi himself has been publicly critical of recent processes that, in his view, have focused more on exclusion than inclusion. He said so again at the book-launch discussion in Mumbai on 20 August 2026. The gap between the standards set out in these pages and current practice are very obvious.
A third thread is how little gets done in government unless someone is willing to outwit apathy, risk-aversion and ritual. Delay and fear of vigilance are the default setting; “Let’s not take a risk” is the guiding principle. Mr Quraishi’s method of dealing with it is a set of small, almost mischievous strategies.
His years at Doordarshan appear to have been the most enjoyable. A marketing cartel, knowing the organisation was frightened of vigilance inquiries on cricket rights, tried to force a collapse of the official reserve price of ₹25 crore. After zero bids, it floated a figure of ₹15 crore. When a colleague proposed direct marketing instead of the ‘transparent’ tender that had been gamed, he authorised it with a knot in his stomach. The West Indies rights sold for ₹80 crore; New Zealand and Australia followed at ₹93 crore and ₹153 crore. The same instinct overrode an entirely risk-averse staff when IIM professor Brij Kothari proposed same-language subtitles on Chitrahaar — karaoke as a literacy treadmill. Lyrics on screen, Mr Quraishi writes, turned an estimated 15 crore Sunday viewers into accidental readers; an independent assessment later showed children’s reading ability rising from 25% to 56% with half an hour a week.
The Planning Commission was no different. A National Institute of Youth Development, rejected for 10 years, was cleared in ten minutes once it had been slipped into a prime minister’s speech. National Voters’ Day followed the same pattern: eight lakh functions at existing polling booths, without an extra rupee, almost derailed when a courtesy letter to the cabinet secretary suddenly became a formal proposal days before launch.
Mr Quraishi’s late marriage to Ila Sharma — journalist, lawyer and former Election Commissioner of Nepal — was, in his telling, unexpected and ‘divinely ordained’. The dedication is to her as the hundredth episode is a raw tribute that is the only intensely personal part of the book.
India and I is not a comprehensive history of the election commission, nor a full accounting of three decades in the IAS. A few episodes are of interest mainly to the man who lived them. What remains is a highly readable and important record of someone trying to inhabit public office without losing humour, nerve, or a sense of the Republic as a shared home. At a moment when public life often feels coarsened by certainty and identity, Mr Quraishi’s voice matters because it still insists that India can be made greater, and that the work towards it can be done in small, stubborn acts that yield positive results.
India and I: A Hundred Memories, Not a Memoir
SY Quraishi
Hachette India, 2026
Price: ₹699
