"I was thereafter invited for talks and lectures at several places and during one such exposition on the Interregnum period of Haidar and Tipu, when I began quoting verbatim some of the letters of Tipu, all hell broke loose in the hall. A section of the hitherto civilized audience broke up in sloganeering, hurling paper rockets at the podium and forcing the organizers to hurriedly terminate the session and usher me inside. Amidst the din, a man reached out to my bewildered and hassled father who sat among the audience with a terse message: ‘He is your only son, advise him well if you wish to have him around you for long!’ If this kerfuffle felt like a scene from a Bollywood film, it sadly was not, but was part of my father and my lived experience. The aggression of that evening stunned us, deeply impacting my mother’s already precarious health. In our naivety, we believed that historiography meant telling the truth as it was. But its intense sociopolitical weaponization was something that we were both unaware of and yet to be confronted with."