Avay Shukla

I am essentially a ” dhaba ” man. Give me a choice between a good, clean dhaba on a highway and a fancy restaurant and I shall plump for the former every time, even if you are paying the bill! This is not a reverse snobbishness, or my inability to decipher “Potatoes Dauphinoise” or ” […]

My review of this book  was published in THE TRIBUNE on April 4, 2021. It is a fascinating account of the attempts made to conquer the ten highest peaks in the Himalaya in the last century. The article/ review is reproduced below.   Avay Shukla “This is a book about the mountains. But it is

If Bal Narendra had spent some more time in school instead of rushing off to sell tea at a railway station which did not even exist at that time, he would have imbibed some wisdom from a couple of old adages: Don’t burn your bridges behind you because you may need them again tomorrow, and, Be courteous to

                                                             A new dawn in Puranikoti The sun doesn’t just rise in my village of Puranikoti ( 7000 feet, pop 190 ) – it explodes. One

At the entrance to the Hall of Remembrance in the US Holocaust Memorial, Washington, the following words are inscribed: GUARD YOURSELF AND GUARD YOUR SOUL CAREFULLY LEST YOU FORGET THE THINGS YOUR EYES SAW. The Jews in France have a shorter version of this exhortation: N’OUBLIONS PAS or LEST WE FORGET. The Jews have a long memory. It’s time

The year 2020, according to the Chinese zodiac, was the Year of the Rat; it actually turned out to be the year of the Bat, but that’s another story. In India it was the year of the Rat- race, and the race is nearing the finish line in 2021. The participants are all our constitutional

Jogishwar Singh ( IAS 1976 ) is the bureaucrat who literally came in from the cold- from his almost ten thousand feet high perch as Deputy Commissioner of Kinnaur to the pleasant cantons of Switzerland. He is also a most unusual civil servant, probably the only one who was selected twice for the IAS, rejected

It’s impossible to get 10 IAS officers to agree on anything except the virtues of the Apex scale,  which is why any contentious matter is passed on to a committee of such officers, to bury it for all time. But there is one thing they will agree on: ask them which was the most memorable