It's taken him more than 30 years to chronicle the experiences he underwent as a strapping, young IAS officer. It had anyway been a long haul for him from the beginning itself, quite literally at that — from getting his bags packed in home Kerala to travelling all the way to farflung, landlocked Manipur. The year was 1978, and insurgency was not yet so virulent in that Northeast state. C Balagopal had cleared the civil services exams, and had been drafted into the Manipur cadre. In the three...