CIVIL LINES

A quartet of books provides a window into the lives of Indian bureaucrats besides showcasing their felicity with the written word

Indian literature across languages has always had a tradition of books by both bureaucrats and diplomats—think of the Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi, the Odia novelist Gopinath Mohanty or, more recently, Englishlanguage novelists like Shashi Tharoor, Navtej Sarna, et al. Thanks to their unique administrative positionality, they are ideally suited to observe a region’s insecurities and idiosyncrasies. A recent bunch of books—three memoirs and a novel—do a good job of describing the highs and lows of the IAS/ IFS life.