I served under three chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir across a career spanning more than three decades, and I have spent years trying to name what those postings had in common. 

It was trust, handed to me at moments when I had done little to earn it, and the responsibility that trust forced on me afterward.

My first encounter came in 1980, when I was twenty-four and had just become Company Secretary of the Jammu and Kashmir State Forest Corporation. Truck drivers went on strike, afraid that the conversion of a government lumbering undertaking into a corporation would cost them their pensions. 

Senior officers available that morning hesitated to face Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah in place of our absent managing director, so the assignment fell to me. 

Sheikh Sahib asked why the drivers were striking. I explained that private timber lessees, angry at losing their business to the new corporation, had likely stirred the unrest. 

He listened, weighed my account against what the drivers themselves had told him earlier that morning, then picked up an intercom and instructed his finance minister to send the men back to work. 

Bureaucratic hierarchy played almost no part in that decision. Judgment did, exercised between two men holding wildly different amounts of power in a single room.

Seventeen years later, as managing director of the Gulmarg Gondola project, I understood what that type of trust demands once it settles on an officer’s shoulders. 

The corporation had to finish the cable car before the first National Winter Games opened on March 1, 1998.........

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