More often than not, the memoirs of civil servants are fraught with risks of weaving personal accounts into a larger canvas of the public realm. And it isn’t unusual to see such exercises get stuck either within cautious tones and guarded memories or narrations from a conceited perch of the governing elite.
Even though the dyad of ‘high power and low-key presence’ in public life goes into the making of the exalted ethos of the services, the trappings of visibility and public gaze have only grown manifold in recent decades. One has to be more alert to such lures especially when a man reflecting back on his life was in public view for donning two hats: one of a top cop credited with the turnaround in law and order situation in Bihar in the first decade of the present century and the other of a physics teacher who worked on the Super-30 initiative training an underprivileged group of IIT aspirants.
