Memoirs Of A Civil Servant

From the tragic massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, to signing the Treaty of Rome when Britain entered the Common Market, Barbara Hosking was there. This is the story of a Cornish scholarship girl with no contacts who ended up in the corridors of power. It is also the very personal story of her struggle with her sexuality as a bewildered teenager, and as a young woman in the 1950s, a time when being gay could mean social ostracism. Born during the General Strike in 1926, Barbara Hosking worked her way through London's typing pools in the 1950s to executive posts in the Labour Party, then to No. 10 as a press officer to Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Between working on a copper mine in the African bush, pioneering British breakfast television and negotiating the complexities of government, hers has been a life of breadth and bravery. Looking back at the age of ninety-one, this is Barbara Hosking's unheard-of account of the innermost workings of politics and the media amid the turbulence of twentieth-century Britain.

If you do not become what you once aspired to become, does it matter? ‘The Aspirant’ looks for an answer to this perennial question. It is the story of a young man who once wanted to become a Carmelite monk, but ended up becoming a monk of a different order - a civil servant. The disillusionment with the way monastic life was practiced, made him take this new direction. The journey ahead as a bureaucrat in CAG’s institution took the author to many places across the globe and caused him to meet several people – ordinary people with extraordinary stories – and those stories add extra layers to this memoir. And all through his life’s varied voyages, a part of him remained as a monk. ‘The Aspirant’ attempts to demystify two venerable institutions - the church and the bureaucracy - with a tinge of irreverence but without an iota of malice.

Confessions of a Civil Servant is filled with lessons on leading change in government and the military. Bob Stone based the book on thirty years as a revolutionary in government. It comes at a time when the events of 9-11 are sharpening America's demands for government at all levels that works.

In this illuminating memoir Javid Chowdhury shares his varied experiences over four decades in the IAS: the years in training when he imbibed the service’s ethos and values; his initiation into the rural universe as the District Development Officer and the District Magistrate; and further on, to his handling of the infamous Bank Securities and Jain Hawala scams as Director of Enforcement and Union Revenue Secretary. With a light pen, Chowdhury describes the changing social profile and attitudes of entrants to the higher civil services; the nepotism, in many garbs, that he encountered as Establishment Officer; and the stranger-than-fiction tortuous investigations of crimes. He also offers his nuanced reflections on the dubious legacy Gujarat acquired as a result of the communal carnage in 2002. Chowdhury further examines how policymaking within government came to be whittled away under the neo-liberal theology, with key scrutiny being left to external expert think tanks and ad hoc groups. As a consequence, he perceives that public accountability came to be inordinately diffused, resulting in the roller-coaster governance that we witness today. Sharp and insightful, replete with telling anecdotes and amusing sketches of icons, colleagues and ministers, The Insider’s View is a compelling portrait of the author, a self-confessed welfare socialist, besides being an X-ray of the innards of the bureaucracy.

The bard wrote: The course of true love never ran smooth . The same is true of this book. It is the memoirs of a civil servant who followed the path of rectitude. This is an interesting autobiographical account full of anecdotes and the author s persona