Description
Far from being a self-eulogising chronicle, K. Vasuki’s The School of Life is a blazingly honest account of her evolution from ‘an imperfect human into, not a perfect human, but a better version of herself ’. Steadfast in her insistence that she is not positing any definitive, universally applicable solutions to the troubles of life, she offers us a glimpse into her inspiringlife and career in the Indian Administrative Service, demandingthroughout that we ‘keep questioning everything’ she says. Unassumingas she is, she even downplays her monumental role in coordinatingthe disaster relief operations during the 2018 floods in Kerala, which devastated thirteen of the state’s fourteen districts. As the DistrictCollector of Thiruvananthapuram, the able and committed Vasuki was also reckoning with a far more pervasive and pernicious issue, which
sparked off not only those floods but this year’s Wayanad landslides too. In her own words, ‘having been at the pinnacle of management’ during the crisis, she was ‘frustrated that as humanity, we are still unable to take concrete action for climate change and that such a disaster has fallen
upon us because of all of our collective failure’. On the whole, The School of Life is an engaging, endearing, and enriching study in courage, which Ernest Hemingway defined-almost with K. Vasuki in mind-as ‘grace under pressure’.
Shashi Tharoor – Member of Lok Sabha
