Media person Jaswin Jassi on his book “Have Guts…!! The Untiring Truth”
The Hindu - Saturday, Nov 29, 2008
Not for nothing is this impression increasingly finding weight that we all have at least one book in us. Look around yourself and you will find its proof in so many first-time authors, many of whom have poured their life stories on to the pages. Some, quite amusingly, don’t quite know whether they will write a second book ever. 

Media person Jaswin Jassi fits this category perfectly. He “might write a sequel” to his just published first book, “Have Guts…!! The Untiring Truth”, but adds, “It is a distant possibility.” In fact, the first book, he says, was born out of an impulse “to give it a shot” after friends told him that he is a good storyteller. “I have never read any book in my life, I never thought of writing one till of course, one day when I was alone at home and had an impulse to try my hand at it.” With a wide grin he adds, “I didn’t have any blank sheets at home that day and my first draft was written on the back of my old bank statements.” He says, “I used to tell endless stories to my friends. They would love them but never knew that they were actually slices of my life till one day I told someone the truth. He told me, ‘you must put it all down in a book’. And so the journey began.” 

A positive book 

Jassi, born in a Khari Bauli haveli in Old Delhi many summers ago, is a well-known face on Doordarshan for over two decades. He also features in the Limca Book of Records as “the fastest filmmaker in India”. These facets plus his production company Arohi Cinematics find space in his book, based on his life, but “Have Guts…!!” is much more than that. It is a vindication of a life of endless struggle to remain afloat and “be somebody.” From selling combs and cosmetics to flashbulbs, he did sundry jobs to keep the kitchen fire going when his father’s business failed. As he grew up, many more challenges came his way. But what Jassi has aimed at is to produce a positive book, “a book which can tell its readers that taming the odds of life, not getting cowed down by it, is the right way of leading it.” He calls his effort “a common man to common man connect.”

Jassi doesn’t call it an autobiography “because if I had attempted one then some 15 to 20 people who came to my life would have got neglected.” His son Aditya Jassi, an upcoming playback singer in Bollywood, “gave a facelift to the book” and Jassi is happy that “he didn’t twist my language like many publishers wanted to do.”

The book, a Diamond Books publication, has recently been released in New Delhi’s India Habitat Centre. 
SANGEETABAROOAH PISHAROTY

The Hindu..........