When I approached the trustees of S. Rajaratnam's estate in 2004 suggesting an authorised biography of the founding leader, I did not realise that the project would take over my life. Altogether, I have spent close to two decades conducting research for this two-part biography, trying to understand Raja the thinker, the writer, the politician, and the man.

I had known Raja since my days as a journalist, and had interviewed him in the 1980s and 1990s, both at his home and in his office. Writing his biography was the furthest thing from my mind then, but those encounters gave me a sense of the kind of man he was – his thinking, his values, his mannerisms.

By the time I officially started on his biography in January 2005, Raja was already suffering from dementia. With the permission of his trustees, I began to browse his personal library and private papers in his old bungalow in Chancery Lane, a process that continued until some months after his death in February 2006. Other than his vast collection of books, there were boxes upon boxes of unsorted personal papers, files, notebooks and photographs, all gathering dust. From among them I found useful nuggets of information, hitherto never revealed, that I have woven into the narrative of this book.

One of them was a letter that Raja had written from his hospital bed in London to his wife, Piroska Feher, in 1983. I learnt much more about their married life from this single letter than all the other sources and interviews put together.

Yet the more I researched, the more I also found that Raja's life was full of carefully guarded secrets. He was a discreet man, a private man. He did not keep a personal diary with intimate details of his life and career, although he kept copious notebooks on ideas or quotes he picked up from books and journals, and his thoughts on them.

He was firm about his decision not to write his memoirs. He gave many interviews and made many speeches, but, as a public figure with a deep abiding sense of privacy, he rarely revealed his personal feelings unless probed, and even then, he exhibited his reserve.