N Gopalaswami had just been appointed home secretary. He was staying in a C-II type government flat, not small but not palatial either.
Now that he was home secretary, a colleague suggested, maybe it was time for him to move to a bigger house, maybe with a large estate and a garden. Gopalaswami thought about it and shook his head. “We’re just the two of us, myself and my wife. We don’t really need a bigger house. This is fine,” he said.
In a city where real estate is a currency of power, Gopalaswami let it go. By contrast, one