Dileep Deshpande joined Imperial Chemical Industries in 1965, the year a young chemistry graduate could expect to be interviewed in English in a wood-panelled office in Bombay by a Scotsman who had been with the company since the war. He stayed with ICI in one form or another for the next forty years.

His career mapped onto the most consequential four decades of post-independence Indian industry. He was on the Mithapur soda ash plant during the License Raj years, in the Bombay headquarters when the FERA dilution reshaped the company’s ownership, in regional management through the long opening of the 1980s, and in senior leadership when the 1991 reforms remade the rules of the country he had been working in all along.

Since retiring he has been writing — first columns, then this site, and now a memoir of those forty years. The pieces collected here are part of that larger project, and are also intended to stand on their own as observations from a particular kind of working life that may not be lived again in quite the same form.

The instinct to write a book runs in the family. His father, Justice V.S. Deshpande, wrote A Chandrachud Reader in 1985 and several other volumes across his judicial career, in the tradition Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s American collections had established a half-century earlier. This is a much humbler effort, in the same form.

He lives in Pune. Correspondence is welcome — from readers, editors, and former colleagues — through the Contact page.