It would have, perhaps, been yet another stuffy formal awards function with long-winded speeches and polite applause but for the personal touch that was lent to it by none other than Manju Singh, the wife of former foreign secretary and governor, the late S.K. Singh.
After all, the occasion was the giving away of the first S.K. Singh Award (for 2010) which has been instituted by his family along with the ministry of external affairs for a serving IFS officer. Ms Singh, with her disarmingly self-deprecating manner, had an audience comprising several former as well as serving diplomats breaking into smiles and even genteel laughter. The first winner of the S.K. Singh Award for excellence in the foreign service is D. Bala Venkatesh Varma, an IFS officer of the 1988 batch. He was handed over the award by Congress president Sonia Gandhi at a function here on Friday.
Ms Singh recalled how when she married the late diplomat in 1974, the “senior wives looked down upon me as to who is this Manju Gupta oblique Singh and where has she appeared from and how dare she marry an ambassador. She never did what we had to do, therefore she’s not the proper wife of a diplomat. I had to work very hard to change that impression, including helping up with the setting up of the ISA trust and recruiting members....”