Personal Life
Menon was an intensely controversial figure during his life, and has remained so even well after his death. Widely described as brilliant and arrogant, he was known for the sheer force of his personality.
A complex man, Menon dressed expensively in bespoke Savile Row suits, while maintaining an otherwise ascetic lifestyle, abstaining from tobacco, alcohol, and meat.
The Sino-Indian War of 1962, marked a turning point in the life of Menon and he himself described it as a "grave mistake" to underestimate China.
Menon was widely reviled by Western statesmen who loathed his arrogance, outspokenness, and fiercely anti-Western stances. American President Dwight Eisenhower considered the outwardly courteous Menon a "menace ... governed by ambition to prove himself the master international manipulator and politician of the age". Western publications routinely referred to him as "India's Rasputin" or "Nehru's Evil Genius".
Read more about this topic: V. K. Krishna Menon
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“Keep your own secret, and get out other people’s. Keep your own temper, and artfully warm other people’s. Counterwork your rivals with diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them: and be firm without heat.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius.... They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)