After the uproar created by his remarks in the CBS show 60 Minutes that after 9/11, the US had threatened to “bomb” Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if it didn’t support the war against the Taliban, it’s learnt that Musharraf wants to be “very careful” on what is being published and how. On this score, he wants to be sure that what goes in the Hindi translation of the book is an accurate description of the original.

What this means is that the Hindi translation, innovatively called Agnipath, will be delayed a few days before it hits the stands. The Kargil chapters have been mailed backed to the author, the General, and printing won’t start until his all-clear comes.

While Musharraf’s book has been advertised by his New York publisher Simon and Schuster as “astonishingly revealing and honest about dozens of topics of intense interest to the world,” the one topic many here are waiting to read is his treatment of Kargil.

Musharraf was Chief of Army Staff under whom the Kargil incursion was planned and that, too, when former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee was meeting then Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif in Lahore.

The two had signed the famous Lahore declaration while the Pak Army was in advanced stages of setting up posts in the Kargil, Dras and Batalik sectors.

Choosing the name for the book was also an interesting exercise. Given that Musharraf was inspired by the 2003 Clint Eastwood film of that name, the thinking by Indian publishers was why not use an Amitabh Bachchan movie for the Hindi version and so the choice fell on Agnipath.

With all in the loop bound by a strict secrecy contract, the only sense on the book is that Musharraf has given a fairly “open account” of the key events in his career. The focus, of course, being the military coup in which he toppled Sharif, the Kargil war, his Kashmir diplomacy with India, 9/11 and the United States, the India-Pakistan border stand-off, his war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the country’s nuclear programme.