By the Same Author

Regardless of the work assigned to each person, we get to deal with an enormous range of issues in the course of a typical 30-plus-year career, from the day of entry into the Indian Foreign Service, right up to the date for ‘superannuation’—a word we Indians have uniquely made our own, meaning the end of an official’s working career. [...] I first appeared for the UPSC exam in the autumn of 1958, the very first year that I crossed the threshold of 21 years; I failed xxiv Diplomacy: At the Cutting Edge to make the grade, and was not called for the interview. [...] In those days, when around 80 were take annually in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), the traditional rival to the IFS; I was the last in the nine taken into the IFS, but a month later when a colleague changed her mind and chose the IAS, 4 Since the 1970s the UPSC has abandoned a minimum passing grade in the interview; this acknowledged the argument of those who felt that a minimum requirem. [...] The country also faced a politico-social challenge, in the mental divisions between the ‘Wessies’ and the ‘Ossies’, much of it the result of apprehension by the latter that joining West Germany had not produced an expected surge of immediate prosperity. [...] A deeper problem was an inability of the German establishment to comprehend that in the process of swallowing East Germany, a new body politic had come into existence that was no longer the West Germany of the past; Bonn’s rejection of all that the former GDR had represented also carried a price.