Leaders Beyond Media Images (Political Profiles of Indira Gandhi, P. V. Narasimha Rao, NTR, YSR, Chandrababu Naidu)

Edited and Introduced by G. Haragopal These six essays written by Balagopal stretching over a period of two decades are penned at different points of time but one running theme in all the essays has been the interconnection between personality, politics and the larger changing socio-economic structure. Although Balagopal was a trained mathematician, he was a very keen observer of social processes not as a behaviouralist or speculative social scientist removed from hard and harsh social realities. He was, like Marx, a social scientist in its most comprehensive sense. The fact that he combined in himself a mathematician, historian, social analyst, a literary critique, a first rate peoples lawyer, and above all an untiring activist bring him close to Marx and the Marxist formulation that action is accomplishment of knowledge and knowledge is fruit of action. Balagopal, in that sense, was an epitome of theory combined with action (praxis). These essays are a testimony to his unusual intellectual abilities to combine such theory and action, to the abstract from the concrete.