Former IAS officer’s latest book tackles graft

Retired IAS officer Veena S Rao recently launched her second book. Titled ‘The Asuras of Antariksh’, the book is about corruption in governance.

A post-graduate in political science from the University of Jammu and Kashmir and in development studies from the University of Cambridge, UK, Veena had a successful career serving the Indian and Karnataka Government.

‘Charlotte’s End’, inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, is her first fictional novel and was published in 2016.

She has also written a play titled ‘The Tale of Quarles, the Prince who Fails’.

The retired IAS officer describes writing as one of the continuing occupations for someone who has been in the service. She says, “Writing is essential in the service; one is always writing analytical notes, papers, speeches etc.”

She took to fiction writing as she felt like documenting the situations she came across in her career. “I started writing my fiction work many years ago, but I never had the time to complete them. I finished them only after I retired,” she adds.

Elaborating on her second novel, she says, “Everyone keeps talking about corruption; there has been so much investigation and writing on it and yet, no one ever talks about it in detail. I thought that why not get a string of various types of corruption and stitch it up with a lot of imagination and write a story.”

Veena, who is well-versed in development issues and governance, writes extensively for national and international publications with a focus on malnutrition.
She also has plans of writing a book on malnutrition.

Veena currently works closely with the Karnataka government, World Bank, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, UK. Visit www.karnutmission.org to read about of Veena’s work on India’s malnutrition.