Bureaucrats and diplomats: The divergence in their post-retirement writing

While IAS officers write primarily about their own exploits, IFS officers write more about the issues and context of their work, while straying also into unrelated fields, notes T N Ninan

Retired government officers are writing books like never before, mostly those from the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). The trend has not spread to lower-caste officials belonging to the “Central Services”, though some former police officers have penned their memoirs. Leaving these out of consideration for the moment, and looking only at books written by those from the IFS and IAS, one detects a pattern.
 
IAS officers, those who occupied the primary positions of bureaucratic power in government, write mainly about their own exploits when in service. In contrast, IFS officers write less about