Mr. Nripati Ghoshal has lived through a tumultuous period in Indian history and his own life is a remarkable representation of that. He suffered through the famine of 1942 and the devastating communal riots; witnessed the birth of a nation in 1947 amidst great social calamity; lived through the ensuing moral and political bankruptcy of the Indian intelligentsia and experienced first-hand the powerful reaches of a politicized and corrupted bureaucracy. In his lifetime he experienced abject poverty and extreme hardship as well as relative wealth and the material comfort that it brings and thus provides a unique perspective on the social, economic and moral standing of both rural and urban India through his autobiography- The Odyssey of an Indian Bureaucrat .