Holy Cows and Loose Cannons — the Duffer Zone Chronicles

Author: Avay Shukla

Published by: Authors Upfront/ Paranjoy, 229 pages

Price: Rs 595 (paperback)

I am delighted to convey that my latest book (seventh!) has been released this week by Authors Upfront/ Paranjoy. It is a compendium of over the last three years or so and, as the title suggests, the pieces take aim at some of our less than admirable personalities and practices.

I am of the firm view that life gives us two types of experiences — the serious and the funny. The secret of retaining one's sanity lies in looking at both with the same lens, but bifocal ones. We should look at the comical and ridiculous side of the serious experience, and at the serious side of the funny one. That way, you balance out both the experiences and live life on an even keel, not veering off to either extreme (which is the mistake most of us make!).

That is what the observations and commentaries in the pieces in this book seek to do, whether they deal with the pomposity of politicians, the mysteries , the inertia of bureaucracy, the prostrating of the media, the intolerance of society, the indifference of celebrities, or the self-serving hypocrisy of self-appointed 'influencers'.

I could tell you more about the book, but will defer to Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar — author, columnist, ex-Union minister and self-confessed maverick — who has penned a superlative foreword to the book and has done a much better job of introducing it than I ever could. So, given below are some extracts from Mani's foreword: 

'Avay Shukla is to Indian writing what James Thurber and Art Buchwald combined were to American funny bone journalism. Another way of describing him might be to say 'Bernard Levin meets Private Eye.'

But perhaps both comparisons are unfair. For Avay stands alone. Neither we nor the world has ever seen anyone like him. He brings wisdom wrapped in wit. Always a delight to read, once you stop laughing, it dawns on you that what he has said is not just hilarious, it is deeply perceptive and hits the issue right in the solar plexus......

'He is the master of the putdown. Writing of one of the saffron brigade's 'intellectuals', one S. Sanyal, a "historian and alleged economist", Avay Shukla advises Mr Sanyal to "stick to history, where he cannot do much damage since it all happened long before him!"

Of a book on our revered PM as a child titled Bal Narendra, Avay says "you can find it on Amazon under the category Fairy Tales/Mythology. If you don't want to buy the hard copy, you can read it on Swindle." And referencing the home minister's assertion that frying pakodas on street corners is also 'employment', Shukla advises that "he is waiting for some political party to make the pakoda its party symbol."

'He doesn't spare himself either. After retirement from the IAS, says Shukla, while examining options for a comfortable sinecure, "a ticket to fight elections was also explored through some Shuklas out on bail in various cases. None of it worked for a good reason: why should any political party offer a ticket to a retired joker when there are so many serving ones lining up?"

'He wields the pen like a rapier, his satire is akin to a curved dagger, his parody a hidden claw. He tops off his thrusts with telling quotes from not only Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw and others, but also limericks and pop songs to exclaim "touché" as the point of his (s)word play finds its target.

I loved his reciting these lines in a column that :

"Said Mother Monkey to her little one/ As she swung on her tail/ It's just a matter of time/ Before you become a Professor at Yale!"

'As a resident of Himachal Pradesh, his muse is the new MP and cine-star, : "My worry is that Ms Ranaut's oomph in such close proximity to the high mountains of Mandi, Manali and Lahaul-Spiti, with their glaciers and snowfields, might hasten their melting..."

'I would commend to the reader Avay's reflections on whether he should become a 'divorce consultant' on retirement although this seems unremunerative in an India where the divorce rate of one per cent contrasts with the US divorce rate of 50 per cent. He comforts himself with the thought that "as long as the institution of marriage exists, divorce will continue to flourish, for, as Groucho Marx said, 'The main cause of divorce is marriage!'

'Avay's command over the subtleties of the English language and the treasure trove of its literature become tools of gut-wrenching, side-splitting laughter in the footsteps of P.G. Wodehouse. Two excellent examples are his Bed and Breakfast (Bail Complementary) [2022] and, if you are not too prudish, his 2023 masterpiece, Of Testaments, Testicles and Telling Times.

'But, unlike Wodehouse whose only purpose as 'the performing flea of English literature' [Evelyn Waugh] was to bring the sunshine of Blandings castle into the lives of his millions of readers, Avay's is a crusade to remind us in the Modi Era of the liberal values we are fast losing, the secularism now abandoned as the PM becomes the 'fifth Shankaracharya', seamlessly "blending politics and religion in one supreme individual", the threats to the institutions of our democracy, the idiocy of economic policies like demonetisation. He does this, not by thundering polemics, but by provoking a guffaw......

'And occasionally, as when he writes of "near-death experiences", and particularly when he addresses environmental issues, he can be very serious indeed. His reminiscences of trekking on Himachal's high Himalayan trails are an evocative encomium to beauty and Nature and the bliss of solitude.

'For all those distressed by the current condition of our polity and the abandonment of 'the idea of India' that guided both our Freedom Movement and the first six-and-a-half decades of nation building, with a Constitution that proscribed the state from having any religion and promoted instead compassion towards our minorities as the hallmark of a civilised nation, and the poor and the historically disadvantaged as the focus of national resurgence, Avay Shukla reminds us, as the Reader's Digest once used to do, that "Laughter is the Best Medicine".

'I commend to you this collection of columns that laughs away our problems while restoring to us our sense of common humanity...'

After this foreword, the book certainly needs no further introduction! Finally, let me wrap this up with what the incomparable Arun Shourie has to say about it: "Avay Shukla is quite the best, by many a mile. He teaches us to look. He makes us laugh. One moment he makes us fume at rulers. The next he makes us furious at our own inertness. Commentaries that will be rivalled only by the next collection of Avay's writings."

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer and author of Holy Cows and Loose Cannons — the Duffer Zone Chronicles and other works. He blogs at 

More of his writing may be read .