By Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh
VC George, my 90-year-old uncle, has just released a book of a hundred stories, titled Some stories I have told and some that I haven’t.
Uncle VC is best known as a former Court of Appeal judge of Malaysia, while many in Singapore’s legal community know him through his arbitration work over the past decades (he retired at 89).
What a superb idea to write one’s memoirs in the form of a hundred stories taking the mickey out of the great and the good of Malaysian society.
The book’s cover is a 1988 cartoon by Malaysian artist Lat. I’ve told my uncle before that I can think of no greater honour than to have been caricatured by Lat.
Congratulations to Chacko Vadaketh and the rest of the team.
The book is available here: https://www.bookxcessonline.com/products/some-stories-i-have-told-and-some-that-i-havent
Sudhir, the writer of this post, lives in Singapore with his wife Liling. We borrowed this post from Sudhir’s FB. 🙂
And here are some excerpts from the Malaysiakini review:
In the preface, George notes: “There is an empty space in bookshop shelves, a space screaming for a book with anecdotes that had been told tongue-in-cheek without malice, and thereafter written down to provide some amusement to the reader, that could raise a chuckle or two, if not a guffaw.”
His judgment in Lim Kit Siang vs United Engineers (1988) ran afoul of the establishment and George notes, “…for which the (then) lord president Hamid Omar as well as Dr Mahathir (Mohamed) apparently never forgave me.”
He is well-versed in the history, practices and culture of the Jaffna Tamils, which he had learnt from Latin tuition master VK Arumugam – thus his ability to comment authoritatively on the one-upmanship between the Jaffna Tamils and the Malayalee community, of which George is one.
In one chapter, George notes (in jest) that the bastions of the country were at one time Malayalees – the prime minister, the attorney-general, the MACC chief and the Bar Council president. Except for Dr Mahathir Mohamed, the others – Tommy Thomas, Latheefa Koya and George Varghese have never disputed their Keralan ancestry.
https://m.malaysiakini.com/news/566901