As Good As My Word

 




Name : As good as my word
Author : K.M.Chandrasekhar
Year of Publication : 2022
Genre : Non-fiction, Memoir
Rating : **** ( 4 stars out of 5)

K.M.Chandrasekhar, the veteran administrator who retired from IAS as Cabinet Secretary, Government of India pens a tell-all memoir that pulls no punches. Like the best of thriller novels, the narrative of the book is unpredictable as every page introduces a new domain that he worked in (while thriller novels happen in an imagined world, this is a work of non-fiction).

Within the limited space of nearly 300 pages, the author manages terror attacks in Mumbai, vegetable shops in Kerala's festive season, drinks with Soviet pepper traders to clinch a business deal, learns how an Arabian sheikh eats, builds a Technopark for his state's capital city, negotiates hard with the Developed Countries at WTO, confront's Reliance's unscientific oil-pricing formula, does last-minute firefighting to ensure India hosts the Commonwealth games well and this paragraph covers just 100 pages in the book. The book throws light on the diversity of experiences an IAS officer gets during his career.

The author does not gloat about his successes and candidly admits his failures. He works hard to protect the Indian Economy from the aftermath of the global recession in 2008 but before one could realise the import of his work, he has passed on to managing an oilmen's strike in the next pages in a matter-of-fact manner. 

The author keeps mentioning the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru at regular intervals. Nehru famously said that “We are little men serving a great cause but because the cause is great something of that greatness falls upon us also.” K.M.Chandrasekhar is a great man because at every stage of his career, he knew that the cause was always greater than him.

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