Kiran Doshi, India's former ambassador to Austria, went ahead and did just that spin a yarn that is. His novel, Birds of Passage, which he started writing in 1995, was released by Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath today.

With South Block's mandarins present in force and a fair sprinkling of former foreign secretaries, the evening turned out to be something of a tribute to the creative potential of the foreign service. As Raghunath put it, his former colleague Doshi could just as well have written dense tomes on nuclear disarmament and subjects of this kind -- the fact that he preferred to venture into fiction was therefore to be welcomed.

Diplomat and author, Pawan Verma, with tongue firmly-in-cheek, referred to the book as something considerably more than a humorous novel -- it was a mirror to the Service, he said, and its potentially subversive material required to be thoroughly scrutinised. But as Doshi put it, he was primarily interested in writing a successful novel with its fair share of sex and sensation. He rather modestly compared himself to the girl in the creative writing class, who when asked to write a novel, with its required quota of humour, sex and suspense, finished the task in five minutes flat.

Naturally, everyone in the class wanted to know what she had written. It read: ``Oh God, I'm pregnant. Wonder who did it?'' Incidentally, Doshi, while on a posting to Ireland, had to handle the aftermath of the tragic crash of Air-India's Kanishka. Today, having retired from the Foreign Service, he lives in Mumbai with wife Razia and their twin daughters.