‘Gandhi’s dream of India has slowly gone to pieces on certain issues...we all should come together...India wants a dream’

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: Vishwanath Pratap Singh started many remarkable things. One, he ended one-party rule. Two, he ensured that whoever has to rule Delhi has to give a say to Patna, Lucknow, Hyderabad and Bangalore. Third, with the help of a man called Mandal, he started a process of social and political engineering that still goes on.When he walked out of Rajiv Gandhi’s Cabinet on the Bofors issue, he set in motion a set of events which historians will judge for years to come. He spoke with Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in Chief, The Indian Express, on NDTV 24X7’s Walk the Talk. Excerpts:

Let me use the phrase that Vajpayee used about himself: ‘Never tired, never retired.’ You fought sickness, you fought political wild-erness, but you’ve always been, somehow, at the centrestage.

Somehow, I never get bored in life.

So, not tired, not retired, not bored?

Yes. And I always find something that totally absorbs me and because I am totally absorbed, much of my worries just vanish.

Worries about health?

Oneself.

But even in terms of health and your own sort of worries, it looks like they are much less now than they were two or three years back. All of your friends and admirers are happy, like me, but you have brought about a remarkable turnaround in your own outlook.

One thing I have found most useful is acceptance. Acceptance that it’s not going to change. For instance, I have this kidney failure and also multiple myloma, which is malignant. I know they are not going to be cured.

Is it cancer?

Yes. It is cancer. I know my days are not many. But if I spend them with a long face, then whatever I’ve got is lost. Why lose what little I have? In the morning, when I get up and feel no pain in my body, I look at myself in the mirror and say: ‘I am alive, so I’ll enjoy this state of health.’ And that is how it is. But if I were grumbling: ‘Had I not been ill, I would have been going around, would have been doing this, I would have been doing that,’ then one is lost.

Your disease and political decline happened around the same time. Was one a consequence of the other?