Of India’s civil servants, Mani Shankar Aiyar may have arguably had one of the most colourful careers. Known for his lacerating wit and many indiscretions, with a career that has seen great highs and lows, he has been a true maverick. In this extraordinarily honest memoir, he tells the story of his first fifty years – from his childhood at Dehradun where he was raised by his feisty widowed mother to nearly becoming the president of the Cambridge Union, to working as a young diplomat who strengthened Indo–Pak ties by brilliantly managing India’s first consulate general in Karachi and then going on to work intimately with Rajiv Gandhi in the PMO.