Anil Swarup arrived at the Vadodara Literature Festival 4.0 on January 29, 2026, without the institutional backing he carried most of his professional life. No ministry. No portfolio. No power to implement or obstruct. Just a book – Not Just a Civil Servant, and thirty years of administrative experience refined into a willingness to be honest about what governance actually requires.
The audience, a mix of students and general attendees, were expecting a standard retired-official speech: a few anecdotes, some careful praise for the government of the day, and advice designed not to offend anyone. But what they got instead was something considerably more direct and a conversation about ethical courage, the practical mechanics of institutional resistance, and the surprisingly personal cost of choosing integrity over convenience.
Purpose Behind Writing A Book
Swarup began by explaining the impulse behind Not Just a Civil Servant. After retiring, he began by speaking at forums and literary events across India, discussing governance, leadership, and public service. The experience, he said, crystallized something he had not expected: talking about these values was easier than writing about them. Writing demanded a different kind of honesty – a willingness to reveal not just the polished outcomes but the difficult processes, the mistakes, the moments where he was wrong.
“Writing a book requires more discipline than a talk,” he told the audience, “because it demands writing with clarity and a willingness to reveal the hard truths of governance – not just the successes.” The result was a memoir that functions as both a personal account and a practical guide for anyone navigating large institutions – which includes, eventually, almost everyone.
The Chhattisgarh Story: Integrity in Action
The most instructive sequence in Swarup’s session came when the moderator asked directly: Is being honest and straightforward actually a challenge in public life? His answer was on point, provable, and informative.
During the launch of the Ayushman Bharat (then Swasthya Bima Yojana) in Chhattisgarh, Swarup approached a state minister to discuss the health insurance scheme’s potential impact on the state’s most vulnerable citizens. But the minister was not interested. He refused to engage. Swarup did not compromise his position, and he did not escalate the situation. He remained, in his nature, honest, calm, and persistent.
A few days later, circumstances provided him with an opportunity to meet the Chief Minister directly. In that meeting, the Chief Minister called the same resistant minister. This time, with the context laid out clearly, the minister’s resistance dissolved. The scheme was approved and eventually implemented successfully.
The lesson Swarup drew was not about clever maneuvering. It was about humility and institutional respect: “If you have work to do, you should go to people yourself – never call them to meet you.” The work was not about his ego. It was about the elderly women who would no longer have to look and wait for healthcare without support.
He still remembered his encounters from this period: while visiting a hospital as part of the scheme’s implementation, he met an elderly woman struggling with serious health issues. He told her she would no longer face such problems. Her response – “Upar jaake main zarur kahungi ki tumhari scheme bohot achi hai” (When I go up there, I will definitely say your scheme is very good) – stayed with him as the most precise definition of why public service matters.
What this story teaches about institutional navigation:
- Ethical resistance to poor decisions does not require confrontation – it requires patience and persistence
- Humility in approach (‘go to people yourself’) is a practical tool, not just a virtue
- Policy impact is measured in human terms – remember the face behind the file
- Consistency in values builds credibility that eventually becomes its own form of influence
Japanese Wisdom, Indian Application: Wabi-Sabi and Soshan
One of the most unexpected passages of Swarup’s session came when he spoke about Japanese management philosophy – not as an abstract theoretical framework, but as a set of practical ideas he had found genuinely useful in the context of Indian governance.
He introduced the concept of soshan – which he connected to the Hindi word shishu (child) and described as a childlike curiosity, an openness to learning without ego. Effective leaders, he argued, must retain this quality. He believes that the moment you stop asking questions because you already know, and you stop being useful. In a bureaucratic environment where seniority can bring stiffness into assumed expertise, the willingness to remain curious is genuinely countercultural.
He also described wabi-sabi – which he pronounced ‘vabisagi’ – as the idea that beauty and value lie in imperfection and authenticity rather than flawless execution. For leadership in a country of India’s scale and complexity, this is not a philosophical nicety. It is an operational reality: waiting for perfect conditions before acting means never acting. The people who need governance cannot wait for perfection.
“Leaders should focus on progress over perfection, adaptability over rigidity, and learning over ego,” he said. The room, full of students who had grown up in an educational system that rewards perfectionism, took this as something more than management advice.
The IIT Kanpur Story: When Confidence Was Nearly Lost
Swarup’s most personally revealing experience came when he described an incident from his time at IIT Kanpur – early in his life, before becoming an IAS, before any of the institutional authority that would later define him.
He had gone to campus for a debate competition. On a impulse, he also registered for a music competition. It did not go well. The audience booed. He was shattered and left in the middle, humiliated and shaken. Nearly withdrew from the debate he had actually prepared for. Fear, embarrassment, and self-doubt formed a kind of compound collapse.
What saved him was a senior who noticed his distress and spent time in conversation with him. Not counselling. Not reassurance. A conversation that helped him understand that one failure does not define capability, and that courage is not the absence of fear – it is the decision to act despite it. He entered the debate. He won.
“Confidence is built through experience, not success alone,” he told the audience. “Failure, embarrassment, and rejection are often necessary steps toward growth. Courage means showing up again, even when self-doubt tells you not to.”
For students getting exam results, career setbacks, rejection, and the particular bruise of public failure, this was among the session’s most durable offerings.
The Q&A: What He Would Tell His Younger Self
The session’s closing Q&A produced a sequence of answers that were, by any measure, unusually direct for a public figure speaking to an audience of mostly students.
Asked what he would tell his younger self when he joined the IAS: “Enjoy the moment,” not “work harder.” ‘Not be strategic.’ Enjoy the moment – because the pressure and the expectations and the long-term thinking can consume the present, and the present is where life actually lives.
Asked about the biggest challenge in making education a real right rather than a paper one: teachers. Not infrastructure. Not funding. The quality and motivation of teachers – the people who actually transmit knowledge, values, and confidence to the next generation.
Asked about his biggest professional mistake: misunderstanding people. Not a policy failure, not a strategic error – the human failure of assuming rather than listening, of miscommunicating rather than connecting.
Key life lessons Swarup distilled from three decades of public service:
- Integrity is built in the small choices, not announced in the big ones
- Communication is the difference between a good idea and an implemented one
- Resilience is a muscle – it grows through practice, not through protection from difficulty
- Public service is not sacrifice – it is the highest available form of privilege, used well
- Live in the present: history teaches, but it should not imprison
What Anil Swarup’s Presence at VLF – Vadodara Literature Festival 4.0 Represents
The decision by IIMUN and Parul University to include a session with a retired IAS officer in a literature festival might seem unusual. It is, in fact, one of the festival’s most considered choices.
Governance and literature share a concern: both are about how human beings make sense of complexity and how they construct the stories – institutional, personal, and national – that allow collective life to function. Swarup’s book is, at its core, a memoir about what it means to serve – with all the weight, compromise, courage, and quiet satisfaction that the word contains.
For students who will one day occupy institutions of their own – whether in the civil services, in business, in medicine, or in public life – the session offered something that no syllabus provides: an account of what ethical leadership looks and feels like from the inside, from someone who has actually lived it. And courses like BA in political science, history, and journalism might turn out to be stepping stones for leadership.
