My name is Inder Mohan Singh. I had a foot-and-a-half long beard, had long hair and tied a turban till about 1996. I was born into a Sikh family of very devout and religious people, made up mostly of physicians and Army officers. I was the youngest, fattest and most spoiled of four children, three male and a female! My two older brothers and eldest sister had not studied in private schools (called public schools in India!) but my father, a retired Army officer who had spent 42 months in Italy and Egypt during the Second World War, was determined that I be educated in an English-medium school . . . . We used to be taken to the Sikh temple regularly and we read the Sikh scriptures off and on (a copy of which was kept ritualistically ‘adorned’ at our home)!