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Mind games and power struggles
For officers in the Indian Administrative Services, an elite few selected from among a few hundred thousand candidates in a year, such situation lurk right around the corner every day as do furtive mind games and power struggles, unexpected transfer orders and endless censure from all quarters.
Leena and Jiwesh Nandan, career bureaucrats who have been through the perils and pleasures of being a part of the civil service, present a candid and vivid picture of life on the inside of the steel frame of India. Narrated with dollops of humour, yet frequently bordering on the reflective, their stories, featuring whimsical bosses and autocratic politicians, overzealous juniors and suspicious spouses, communal riots and railway disasters, cover the whole gamut of experiences of the IAS life.
How to Placate an Angry Naga
Leena Nandan & Jiwesh Nandan; Penguin; Rs.195
Allahabad revisited
Located at the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and the invisible Saraswati, Allahabad, or Godville, the babu translation of the name that Mark Twain came across, has been frequented by pilgrims for two thousand years. However, it was only towards the latter half of the nineteenth century that Allahabad shed its identity as another dusty north Indian town and emerged as on of the premier cities of the Raj and the capital of the North-West Provinces.
Colonial Allahabad, along with the intellectual energy that colonialism generated, has all but disappeared. The bungalows have gone, and so have the last of those who inhabited them. Their descendants can only recall a lost time. The volume is a memorial to a now forgotten city whose rise was as meteoric as its fall. The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad
Edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra; Penguin; Rs. 395
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