Only when you die will you cease to feel ridiculous. - Upamanyu Chatterjee

[Stories and Poetry from the Room of IAS Officers]

Upamanyu Chatterjee is an Indian author and administrator, noted for his works set in the Indian Administrative Service. He has been named Officier des Arts et des Lettres (Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters), by the French Government.

Upamanyu Chatterjee (born 1959) is a retired Indian civil servant who served as Joint Secretary to Government of India on the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board. He is a 1983 batch Indian Administrative Service officer from Maharashtra Cadre. He currently resides in Sri Lanka.

He is an author best known for the novel English, August.

Chatterjee has written a handful of short stories. His best-selling novel, English, August : An Indian story (subsequently made into a major film), was published in 1988 and has since been reprinted several times. The novel follows Agastya Sen – a young westernised Indian civil servant whose imagination is dominated by women, literature, and soft drugs. This vivid account of "real India" by the young officer posted to the small provincial town of Madna is "a funny, wryly observed account of Agastya Sen's year in the sticks", as described by a reviewer in The Observer. His second novel, The Last Burden, appeared in 1993. The Mammaries of the Welfare State was published at the end of 2000 as a sequel to English, August. His fourth novel, Weight Loss, a dark comedy, was published in 2006. His fifth was Way To Go, a sequel to The Last Burden, published in 2010. His most recent work is Fairy Tales at Fifty, was published in 2014. Dr. Mukul Dikshit opines that Chatterjee has, for the first time, focused on a "new class" of Westernised urban Indians who were hitherto ignored in the regional as well as the English fiction of India.

In 2009, he was awarded Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of his "exemplary contribution to contemporary literature" In 2004, he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Mammaries of the Welfare State. The novel Way To Go was shortlisted for The Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010.

Some snippets/ quotes from the Book:

• “Only when you die will you cease to feel ridiculous.”
• “We are men without ambition, and all we want is to be left alone, in peace so that we can try and be happy. So few people will understand this simplicity.”
• “In his essay,Agastya had said that his real ambition was to be a domesticated male stray dog because they lived the best life.They were assured of food,and because they were stray they didn't have to guard a house or beg or shake paws or fetch trifles or be clean or anything similarly meaningless to earn their food.They were servile and sycophantic when hungry;once fed,and before sleep,they wagged their tails perfunctorily whenever their hosts passes,as an investment for future meals.A stray dog was free,he slept a lot,barked unexpectedly and only when he wanted to,and got a lot of sex.”
• “No one reveals himself more completely to others than to himself - that is, if he reveals himself at all.”
• “I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits.”
• “He absent-mindedly fondled his crotch and then whipped his hand away.No masturbation,he suddenly decided.He tried to think about this but sustained logical thought on one topic was difficult and unnecessary.No,i am not wasting any semen on Madna.It was an impulse,but he felt that he should record it.In the diary under that date,he wrote,'From today no masturbation.Test your will,you bastard'. Then he wondered at his bravado.No masturbation at all?That was impossible.”
• “You feel even more naked and alone, he said silently, when you reveal yourself, a gratuitous act, for the strength and comfort you look for, any of those last illusions of consolations, can finally be only within you.”
• “Land is important everywhere, all kinds of land. But you have lived in cities. There you cannot sense the importance of agricultural land, it's the real wealth. Each of these squares and hexagrams could be worth lakhs.”
• “He didn't want the friends of the different stages of his life to meet. Their encounter would alm