Shashi Ranjan Kumar is an Indian civil servant, author and poet. He graduated in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi in 1989. A 1992-batch officer of the Indian Administrative Service from the Tripura cadre, he has held senior positions in the Government of India and currently serves as Secretary, Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). Alongside a distinguished career in public administration, he has pursued a sustained engagement with literature, science, history and the intellectual traditions of India.
Kumar’s literary journey began with Samudra Tat Par (On the Seashore), a collection of poems in Hindi. The poems are marked by a quiet engagement with love, nature, beauty, memory and the passage of time. Kumar approaches poetry as a mode of recovering experience—of gathering fragments of memory, fleeting moments and the seemingly insignificant details of everyday existence.
In 2019, Kumar published Mysteries of the Universe, a work that explores some of the most fundamental questions confronting human beings: Is the future predictable? How real is reality? What are the limits of human knowledge? Moving between science and philosophy, the book traces the human quest to understand the universe and, in doing so, offers a broad intellectual history of scientific thought.
His most recent and ambitious work is The Decline of the Hindu Civilization: Lessons from the Past, published by Rupa Publications in December 2025.