29 She This chapter on an intensely personal experience of the author's, written without inhibition in the D. H. Lawrence style, has been withdrawn by the author at the last moment. A PUBLISHERS 1 November 197730 V.K. Krishna Menon—I Krishna Menon was born in 1896. He completed his college education in Madras and became 4 follower of Annie Besant. He ‘was put in charge of scouting. In 1924, at the age of twenty-eight Annie Besant sent him to England to teach in a theosophical school in Letchworth. He taught for a year and in 1925 obtained a London diploma in teaching. From 1925-27, he studied political science under Harold Laski in the London School of Economics and took a B.Sc. He became Joint Secretary of Annie Besant’s Commonwealth of India League. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1934 at the age of thirty-eight when all one had. to do was to eat a few dinners in dinner jackets. Actually he never studied law; in London he had no legal practice worth mentioning. Much has been made of his editing books in London. Editing. meant condensing. He edited only the first batch of Pelican books. ‘He was in partnership with Allen Lane of Bodley Head. Lane soon found Krishna Menon a strain on his nerves and called him a bottleneck. Thus ended the partnership. Krishna Menon stayed in the slum ateas of London in extreme poverty. For long years he subsisted on innumerable cups of tea, biscuits and sometimes lentil cutlets. In the process he damaged his health. A south Indian journalist, as a command performance, wrote extensively on Krishna Menon. He would have us believe that Krishna Menon’s family was accustomed to wealth; that his father belonged to a line of Rajas who enjoyed royal privileges; that considerable luxury surrounded Menon’s years of childhood; and that, in the wake of idealism, Menon cut himself off from riches and pleasures. If you tell this to anyone in north Kerala, he will laugh. Actually Menon’s father, Krishna Kurup, was one of the junior pleaders of a landlord in the small town of Tellicherry. The