Dehradun, Feb. 17 -- The Diplomats Who Built Independent India's Foreign Policy', published by Harper Collins last year.

Of course, the predecessor service to, both, the IAS and the IFS was the ICS, and the seniormost member of the ICS Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai was actually designated as Secretary General. But this book is not just about those who entered the Foreign Service through the ICS and the IFS route - it is also about patricians, princes, journalists, poets, stenographers, INA members and radio announcers who were often asked to take up positions in different parts of the world to meet the extraordinary situation that emerged at the end of the Second World War. Bhattacherjee has reconstructed these stories after a series of inter...