Mohinder Singh, a member of the Indian Administrative Service for 35 years, retired as Secretary to the Government of India, has written a book titled "A Sikh Boy".

The book is an earthy, robust and deeply funny account of the privileged life of a young Sikh boy for whom life is beautiful. He is a headmaster's son in an all-boys' school in the North West Frontier Province.

The story is set in the fictitious town of Sripur a charming settlement blessed with great scenic beauty, natural streams and luscious fruit orchards in the first half of the twentieth century, is an account of growing up in a middle-class Sikh household in the years before electricity and running water.

He is protected in the embrace of his extended family, and trained from the more rough aspects of an all-boys' school by his father's exalted status. Monu lives a fortunate life full of undeserved favours, sly loves and small triumphs. But then Partition looms its ugly head and in no time at all his innocent world is ripped asunder, as petty biases and mindless racial slights deepen into a divide of deathly proportions. It is not just an account of an idyllic childhood but an examination of the mindset of a young Punjabi youth, who, caught in the thick of the 1947 riots inexplicably and unthinkingly perpetrating violence, begins to question his deeply ingrained biases.