India, Jan. 16 -- The central subject of the personal essay is the author himself. Its undying father, Montaigne, said. "I am myself the matter of my book," when the first two books of his essays appeared in 1580. The essay is a kind of vanity publishing in this sense. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's introduction to The Book of Indian Essays (which he has edited) is great prose in pursuit of its authors. But the personalities lack the pioneering authority of a Montaigne. Naturally; for the day of the heroes is long over. This is especially true of the writer posing as a personality hoping to make himself interesting to the reader, who, in a paradigm shift in collective behaviour brought about by social media, finds himself, dramatically, at centre stage, contributing to a kind of tyranny of the masses. This is the Age of the Mob, not just of the killing fields and streets, but also of the drawing rooms....