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Synopsis These are very informal memoirs of a life at the center of India’s freedom struggle, marginalized after the partition-afflicted Independence. A country boy from UP, Ansar Harvani played a challenging part in the momentous Gandhi-Nehru-Jinnah-subhas eera, fought the two-nation activists tooth and nail, opted for secular India as his home, and represented his constituency in Indian Parliament. His career has encompassed the sub-continent’s most crucial half a century, filled with dramatic turn of events and encounters with great names of contemporary history. Vivid and nostalgic, before Freedom and After is studded with anecdotes and detailed insight into events and people as they really were. The journalist freedom-fighter shows the guts to call a spade a spade. His narration brings into focus the neglected yet important areas of our social and political development. His memoirs, or recollection as he likes to call them, fill many a gap in the official history. The book is an important source of history of the freedom struggle and post-Independence Indian affairs, and the makes fascinating reading.