Odyssey of a Civil Servant: From Arrack Bottling to North Block to Mint Street

 

Odyssey of a Civil Servant: 

From Arrack Bottling to North Block to Mint Street

It is well-known that an IAS officer loves his own voice, often tells ancient stories in which he was the hero, and his actions as Collector in a certain district were so exemplary that people there still remember him with love, respect, and awe. However, as soon as he begins with ‘When I was Collector ….,’ the audience mentally switches off, while pretending to listen and nodding politely from time to time.

Why are autobiographies of IAS officers generally unreadable? They are so full of themselves, each convinced that he is the sun around which planets big or small revolve, for that’s the divinely ordained arrangement to maintain order! Most often, they are out of touch with reality. Further, after more than three decades of work in government offices, they have lost the ability to write simple, comprehensible prose. Why don’t they hire professional writers to do the job? Surely, they can afford to pay for that.

Duvvuri Subbarao, during his session at the Bhopal Literature Festival 2025, spoke about his book Just A Mercenary? What a pity, hardly any serving IAS officer attended the session even though it was a Sunday. His brief talk about his life and career was interesting, so I bought a Kindle copy for 359.31, finished it soon, and enjoyed reading it.

This is not a book review, so I jump straight to Chapter 6 – Make Haste Slowly: My relatively short tenure as a District Collector – from which I quote:

‘That I did not have a stable tenure as a district collector is, therefore, one of the disappointments of my IAS career.’

Mr. Subbarao was the topper of his batch (1972), and had a stellar career with several challenging yet deeply satisfying assignments. He worked in the World Bank for five years, resigned from the IAS a year before his retirement, and was RBI Governor from 2008–2013.

Why, then, is Mr. Subbarao ‘disappointed’ about his brief tenure as Collector? Because people, including IAS officers themselves, still believe that Collectorship is the defining assignment in the career of an IAS officer. The myth persists even after much erosion in the authority and aura of Collector.

So, how long was Mr. Subbarao’s tenure as Collector? ‘Twenty-one months but spread over three districts,’ he writes. Longest tenure was of ten months!

Even though this blogger was Collector in three districts for four years and eight months — a fair tenure, surely — he nursed a grievance that early in his career he had been transferred from a district in just nineteen days. Must be a record for the shortest tenure as Collector in MP, and maybe in the country, too, he often thought; till he read Mr. Subbarao’s book.

Mr. Subbarao, upon being posted as Collector, Krishna, enthusiastically took an early morning train from Hyderabad to Vijayawada where he was received by a lone deputy tahsildar who informed him that, as per a message received from the State Government, the posting was ‘on hold’ and that he was to return to Hyderabad. Thoughtfully, the deputy tahsildar had already bought a return ticket for the officer who was not his Collector.

This blogger mistakenly thought that he held the record for the shortest tenure as District Collector in the country!

Vignettes from Just A Mercenary?

• His UPSC interview had a disastrous start for he knew little about Muharram.
• Embarrassed to mention it to colleagues and relatives when posted as OSD (Officer on Special Duty) to set up arrack-bottling plants in each district.
• N. T. Rama Rao, the CM, always used the royal ‘We’! His meetings began at 4.30 am!
• ‘RBI takes cheap money from the government, banks and the public (yes, the currency we hold in our wallets is an interest-free loan to the RBI) and invests it in interest-bearing foreign and rupee assets.’
• Last chapter Letter to my Mother is touching.
• Just a mercenary? Or, was I more? ‘The judgement will perhaps remain reserved for ever.’

Note: Serving IAS officers, especially young officers, may like to read this book. By the way, my spouse finished the book before I did, undeterred by the references to implementation of LTR (Land Transfer Regulation) in ‘agency areas,’ preparation of government budgets, management of public finance, and RBI’s struggle to balance inflation and growth.

Further Notes

Encyclopaedia Britannica on autobiography

‘Formal autobiographies offer a special kind of biographical truth: a life, reshaped by recollection, with all of recollection’s conscious and unconscious omissions and distortions.’ The novelist Graham Greene said that, for this reason, an autobiography is only “a sort of life” and used the phrase as the title for his own autobiography (1971).

Quotes

‘Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.’
— W. H. Auden

“The urge to write one's autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later.”
— Agatha Christie

“Autobiography is a pre-emptive strike against biographers.”
— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison