It is something of a mixed blessing that our National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, is a man of few words. He does not speak often in public. He has been spotted eating biryani in the open in Shopian in Kashmir, but he rarely speaks in public, which is the downside of the blessing. It deprives us of useful information that only a person in his position is privy to. When he speaks, and those who have known him for long testify to this, his words sound as though they were part of some stream of consciousness, an undercover operator imparting undercover information. Sometimes the semantics is a little garbled, the import uncertain when the words have emerged as a hoarse Chinese whisper before they are passed on with due amplification. Even acclaimed practitioners of the genre, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf or that American, William Faulkner, would have to deploy a grammar squad to chase after the verbs, both transitive and intransitive, the objects, the modifiers, and the complements to glean their true meaning. But the end result is pucca worth it, not like those oracular translations you glimpse from time to time, processed by some smooth stenographer working in the media of a particular variety. He only seems to have gotten better with time.

Ajit Doval spotted eating biryani in the open in Shopian in Kashmir in 2019 |

Last week, he spoke at IIT Madras, that shrine of best scientific practices, with the Director, V Kamakoti, in the audience. Dr Kamakoti is a very valued scientist who recently told us about peptides present in cow urine and its........

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