Books are back in news. They have booked prime time slots on news channels and are being covered – cover to cover – by all other non-hysterics-rousing media. Even non-readers have booked a date with books these days, it seems. So they are happily burning them in apparent rage. NSUI’s apparently-young men were the latest to join the party when they lit the matchstick for Sangh ideologue Dinanath Batra’s books in Vadodara on August 2.

Earlier, Batra had got a book on Hinduism by Wendy Doniger pulped.

The latest to hold prime time attention is Natwar Singh’s autobiography ‘One Life Is Not Enough’, though no one is trying to torch it. At least not yet. Now, while TV soap viewers might mistake the title for One Wife Just Ain’t Enough, such insensitive observations about a book on an issue as sensitive as India’s oldest party’s first family can be kept out of the conversation here.

For the record, Sonia Gandhi has threatened to do a Natwar Singh on Natwar Singh. Write a book, that is.

“I will write my own book and then everyone will know the truth. The only way the truth will come out is if I write,” she told the media recently. The revelation revealed itself when reporters asked her for reaction on Natwar Singh’s allegations that she, well, lied about the real motive behind rejecting the job offer to be the Indian PM. According to Natwar Singh, Gandhi was economical with the truth, and that her “inner voice”, which had purportedly asked her to pass the chair on to Manmohan Singh in 2004, was not exactly inner.

In fact, to believe Natwar Singh, the voice was quite external – it belonged to Rahul Gandhi.

As dust settles on the issue, we speak with Sonia Gandhi’s hand and her pen that are slated to pen that counter-autobiography. Edited excerpts from the interview:

How do you plan to write the book?

Hand: With pen.

Pen: By hand.

I mean, how?

Hand: How boley toh? We plan to pen it painfully, page by page, chapter by chapter.

Pen: It will begin from the beginning and end where it ends. In between there will be page after page that will damage all the canards being spread about Sonia-G.

Which events will be addressed by the book?

Hand: Everything that has anything to do with anything remotely connected to the last three generations of Gandhis.

Pen: Think key words; think search engine optimization – Sonia, Maino, Gandhi, Rahul, Rajiv, Priyanka, Indira, Janpath, 10, ten, tension, attention, corruption, inner, feelings, UPA...

Will the book talk about what exactly happened that day in 2004 when Manmohan Singh stopped being Manmohan Singh and turned into Maunmohan Sigh – that is to say when he became the PM?

Hand: All the lies will be exposed. Truth will emerge.

Pen: Truth will emerge. All the lies will be exposed.

So who owns that inner voice?

Voiceover: Mamma mia, o piazza, capsicum pizza, whato, inner voico, interview overo.