Rogues Among the Ruins – Achala Moulik

Rogues Among the Ruins portrays the conflict of civil servants caught between ideals and thirst for success. The novel adopts the style of great masters like Cervantes and Gogol who in search of truth and justice evoke laughter through tears. The first part of the novel Life Among the Ruins is a gripping fictionalised account of the Archaeological Survey of India and the painful predicaments of a dedicated but naïve scholar faced with temptations.

His son, a morally neutral civil servant caught in the conflict between power and ideals, chronicles a later era in the second part Romance Among the Ruins. Through tawdry dramas, administrative acrobatics of sycophants and hypocrites, he encounters the reality of powerful men and women who think they rule the country.

He further describes his friends and colleagues with sardonic humour, sympathy and respect while taking the reader onto a journey through Glory Road where principles are discarded by the ambitious, where the proud encounter humiliations, where idealists are scorned, and sometimes those with stubborn strength overcome ordeals.