Set against Sri Lanka’s recent political upheavals, The Department of Chosen Ones moves inside the machinery of the state to expose how power actually functions. Drawing on the author’s firsthand experience within the Presidential Secretariat and across the development world, the book traces how patronage, loyalty, and proximity quietly shape institutions, decisions, and outcomes, regardless of who holds office. It reveals a system sustained not only by political leaders, but by the everyday incentives, silences, and compromises that govern public life.
Moving between moments of national crisis and the routines of governance, the narrative offers an unvarnished view of how reform is attempted, diluted, resisted, and absorbed. Government and opposition blur into one another as ideals collide with institutional realities. Policies are debated, crises managed, and promises made, yet beneath it all runs a deeper logic that rewards access over merit and loyalty over dissent. Rather than focusing on personalities, the book examines the structures that endure when leaders change, and asks why systems designed to serve the public so often end up serving themselves.
At the same time, The Department of Chosen Ones is a coming-of-age story. It follows a young woman navigating ambition, love, and aspiration while growing into her convictions inside a state resistant to change. The personal and the political unfold together as the author reckons with what it means to belong, to dissent, and to mature within institutions that demand compromise as the price of survival. Relationships, ambitions, and ideals are tested alongside careers and conscience, revealing the quiet emotional costs of public life.
Clear-eyed yet intimate, the book resists easy villains and tidy conclusions. Instead, it reflects on why meaningful reform is so difficult to sustain, what integrity costs in practice, and how hope persists even amid disillusionment. The Department of Chosen Ones is both an anatomy of Sri Lanka’s political system and a meditation on power, growth, and the uneasy work of becoming oneself in a country where change is never simple, but always necessary.
The Department of Chosen Ones 