An Outsider Everywhere – Revelations by an Insider

Autobiographies of civil servants generally make for banal reading. These are either exercises in self-glorification or attempts at pontification.

This is an autobiography with a difference. M.K. Kaw, the author of Bureaucrazy fame is known for his style imbued with humor and pen dipped in satire. here he takes a look at his own life, starting with a zany essay on why he is called 'Kaw', which means 'crow' in Kashmiri. In one of the chapters he refers to the phenomenon which led some of his younger colleagues to revel in the appellation 'Kawboy'.

The text is peppered with half-remembered lines of a childhood poem celebrating the exploits Natha Singh, a truck driver of Delhi. He is not omitted to reproduce in his unexpurgated virility a naughty limerick he composed at a party about his chief secretary's non-performing member.

There are revelations about the exploits of politicians and bureaucrats, as seen from the perspective of a poet who got trapped in the topsy-turvy world of bumbledom.

Kaw has manfully resisted the temptation to deliver high-sounding sermons at hapless juniors in the service. He has instead concluded with tongue-in-cheek aphorisms camouflaged as 'pearls of wisdom.'