Taxing times of a 'Confrontationist'

Sukumar Mukhopadhyay 's engagingly written memoir, which is full of stories and lessons to be drawn, should be made a compulsory read for all revenue officers

It’s unlikely that many people outside the government, and even there only those who served till about 2010, would have heard of Sukumar Mukhopadhyay. We at this newspaper got to know him when he started writing a column in the mid-1990s.

He has now written his memoirs, which are actually a collection of his blogs. True to his personality, he calls the book just Autobiography. It’s a very valuable addition to the literature on how the government and his own department actually functioned and the difficulties that the honest people in government face.

He retired from the Indian Revenue Service with a