Comprising 99 stories, essays, extracts, poems and articles (one for each year of his life), the book is divided into fifteen sections, each one corresponding to a genre that he excelled in. Family Matters contains extracts from his autobiography and some personal narratives; My Beloved Country has some extraordinary writing about India; The Sikhs comprises excerpts from his books essays on the community and translations of the Sikh hymns; The Uses & Abuses of Religion features his articles on the dangers of communalism, and a sublime meditation on religion; his accounts of Pakistan and Pakistanis are included in Passage to Pakistan; he wrote interestingly about famous people all his life, and twelve of his profiles feature in Singular People; a self-taught naturalist, he was passionate about conservation-The Ferocity & Flamboyance of Nature has writings on this theme; Sex on My Mind contains some entertaining ruminations on sex, one of the subjects that he was most associated with in the popular imagination. As with sex, so with humour-a few of his funniest jokes find a place in A Merry Heart. The section Enthusiasms, Rants & Soliloquies has a fair representation of his electrifying polemics on a variety of subjects. The most insightful of his thoughts on life, dealing with adversity, ageing and death find a place In How to Live, How to Die. Selections from the six novels he published are to be found in The Novels; Portrait of a Lady & Other Stories features the eponymous story along with a few others; a great admirer of writers in Urdu, Punjabi and Hindi, he translated many of their works, some of which can be found in Toba Tek Singh: Fiction in Translation and A Passion for Poetry. Together, the various pieces in the book showcase Khushwant Singh's exceptional accomplishments as a writer.
