John le Carré & Smiley’s people December 21, 2020, 7:06 PM IST
Dr (Prof) Sadhana Kala is a USA-trained robotic & laparoscopic surgeon, Uppsala University, Sweden, trained fertility specialist, and ‘National Icon Endoscopic Surgeon of India.
University topper and winner of several gold and silver medals and Certificates of Honor and the unique ‘Distinction’ in medicine in medical college, she is the youngest-ever Professor in any medical college anywhere, and the only-ever gynec Hon Consultant to the Army, Navy and Air Force.
FORMER: President Family Welfare Foundation of India (now closed) one of the few UN -accredited NGO since 1997; Member of Central Consumer Protection Council, Government of India, the apex national advisory body on consumer affairs; Advisor, Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India; Member, Advisory Committee, MTNL (Delhi).
John le Carré (1931–2020): Spy novelist and “inside-outside” man
British author and former intelligence agent John le Carré died of pneumonia December 12 aged 89 years. Le Carré leaves behind an intriguing body of literary work set against a background of some of the key political and social developments of the past half-century. In the course of his career, le Carré was able to draw from experiences made during and after the Cold War to attract millions of readers with his carefully researched spy novels.
Born in 1931, David John Moore Cornwell he adopted the name John le Carré as an author in the early 1960s was the son of Ronnie Cornwell, a conman with upper class airs who was permanently in debt due to his criminal business ventures. David Cornwell had a generally miserable childhood. The boy could hardly admit to his well-heeled, upper class fellow students his father was a convicted criminal. At a young age, he already felt himself to be somewhat of an interloper w
His father didn t admit until he [le Carré] was an adult that he d served a jail term, and his mother left late at night without saying goodbye, said Sisman. As a boy, le Carré told school friends his father had been a spy.
Sisman explained: He was of a generation, during the war, that what your dad did was terribly crucial. Ronnie was that most despised person, a war profiteer, rather than away at the front fighting in the army. He was sent to Sherborne, the Dorset public school, but ran away when he was 17. And here the truth and the fiction of his life start to collide - he claimed he d been recruited by MI5 to spy on student groups in Bern, Switzerland.
Troubled spirit: John le Carré
Credit: Hulton Archive
John le Carré spent most of his childhood pining for his mother and much of his adult life wishing his father would disappear. In later life he stated frankly that the absence of one parent and the overbearing presence of the other were the key to understanding his life and his fiction.
It is Ronnie and Olive Cornwell we have to thank for giving their son David the gifts and temperament that would transform him into John le Carré, the outstanding spy novelist of the 20th Century. His intertwined careers as an intelligence officer and as a writer seem, in retrospect, inevitable, given the events of his youth.