The Enduring Babu

This is a collection of narratives.  They are not fictional but based on real life incidents of which the author was a witness during his career as a civil servant in West Bengal and Delhi.
These are not memories of a civil servant in the conventional sense.  There is no postmortem of any government action.  There is no advice or exhortation to anyone in the government on matters relating to administration.
There is neither a beginning nor an end to this string of narratives.  For convenience, they begin with the author's induction into the service nearly fifty years ago and have followed, broadly, the sequence of his postings.  The merit of this sequence is only chronological.  The pleasure of recalling what happened in the distant past is the same as compared to the more recent happenings.
The persons featured in these narratives vary from the high and mighty like Ministers and Governors to ordinary people. As both a witness and a participant in the events described, the author has tried to convey some idea of the social and political background which will be of interest to the reader.