The Outsider’s Curse: A Memoir of the First “Outsider” Lady IAS Officer of Jammu & Kashmir

What new can you talk of, except of cataloguing the postings you suffered and the “successes” you had over some boring 37-years of service in the government?

What’s new about Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) too, when there are so many books already on the subject?

On the Kashmir dispute in the United Nations, on the valour of the Indian Army and how they foiled the “evil designs” of our enemies in 1947, 1962, 1965, 1971 and 1999, on the beauty of Kashmir, about the pilgrimages to Vaishno Devi and Amarnath Shrines and on J&K as a wonderful tourist destination.

And then there are biographies, hagiographies and auto-biographies of politicians ad nauseam .

The pain and suffering of the Kashmiri Muslims in those “curfewed nights” of the 1990s have already been catalogued. The Kashmiri Pandits too have written about their horrific exodus, how they lost their little paradise-on-earth, and what is stopping them from regaining that paradise. 

Agreed.

But what I found missing was—what an outsider Indian Administrative Service (IAS), or for that matter, any officer belonging to any All-India Service (AIS) like IPS (Indian Police Service) or IFoS (Indian Forest Service), goes through while serving in J&K. In my case, there was an added disadvantage—I was the first outsider lady IAS officer serving my full term in this cadre.