Krishnan Srinivasan is an MA from Oxford and joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1959. He was head of diplomatic missions in Libya, Zambia, Botswana, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, Netherlands and Bangladesh before becoming Secretary and Foreign Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs. He was subsequently deputy Secretary-General of the Commonwealth from 1995 to 2002. He has been a visiting fellow at the universities of Cambridge, Leiden, and Uppsala and has published nine books on international relations and nine novels apart from being a regular columnist and book reviewer in newspapers and journals.