The protagonist of The Last Post, Rangarajan, is the editor of the one and only English newspaper in Narasimhapura, a fictive small town in Karnataka. Starting off as a lowly waiter in a coffee shop, the worldly-wise man rises to the position of office boy and then editor of the newspaper, a position he is loath to lose. The newspaper itself had come into being because the local arrack trader, Bhimanna, had to get into the good books of an unapproachable government official whose only weakness was reading English newspapers. Since the official...

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