Just woman Brajesh Mishra and an old friend swap South Block tales. It is a chilly 5 'o clock December evening when a sharp ring from the telephone breaks into their conversation. Mishra answers, quickly following up his 'hello' with a cheery 'Good morning! I'm very pleased you've got the job...' 'Was that Washington then?' asks the old friend when the call concludes - a guess based on the difference in time zones. 'No, it was Chokila Iyer,' replies Mishra, national security adviser and the Prime Minister's principal secretary, with a smile. It could have been a messy situation, but Iyer's appointment as India's first woman foreign secretary showed 'a rare display of consensus' between Mishra and foreign minister Jaswant Singh. Realising that an appointment of the much favoured Kanwal Sibal, at present ambassador to France, as foreign secretary - over the other contenders, including Iyer, two batches senior to him - would have caused far too much heartburn among the foreign service ranks, Singh decided to sidestep Sibal this time round. An argument, insiders say, that was put forward by Brajesh Mishra quite sometime ago. But the diminutive, rather nondescript Iyer herself, currently ambassador to Ireland, has admitted in an interview, to the 'surprise element' being clearly there in the news of her appointment. She cannot but be aware that someone with her relatively unimportant innings has never made it to the post of foreign secretary before. As one old South Block watcher puts it: 'It is one of those famous happenstances where someone lands somewhere without any speculation whatsoever.' As the second seniormost IFS officer she was of course nominally in the race. But no one gave her a second thought with Deb Mukherjee, ambassador to Nepal and the seniormost in the IFS hierarchy, Sibal, recently designated the next secretary (East), Dalip Mehta, the dean of the Foreign Services Institute, and R.S. Kalha, secretary (West) in the running. It was Sibal, brother of Congress Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal, who was seen as the strongest contender. 'But promoting Sibal to the post of foreign secretary would have superseded 18 officers which would have caused far too much resentment. It might have led to many resignations or to the officers taking the government to court which would clearly have been embarrassing,' says one foreign affairs commentator. Deb Mukherjee on the other hand was too senior. If appointed he would have had only seven months in the job, while Iyer will have 14 months to retirement. 'Finally, the Prime Minister stepped in and chose to appoint Iyer, though it is true that going by usual standards she does not fit the bill for the post,' says a PMO insider. Chokila Iyer, Tshering before she married G.C. Iyer who retired as controller general of accounts, is by all accounts 'a very decent person and a very correct officer,' says a retired bureaucrat. 'She always maintains her dignity and given that all critical foreign policy decisions are by and large taken by the PMO, Iyer is seen to be a reliable enough conduit,' he concludes. What Iyer lacks, apart from a definitive personal profile of any kind, is the right sort of experience. She has never been head of a mission in one of the important locations, like China, Russia, the European Union, the UK or the United States. She has instead been in the Seychelles, Mexico, The Netherlands and now Ireland. She will also be the first foreign secretary who has not been posted in any of India's neighbouring countries. Both are considered to be the two most important unwritten qualifications for the job of the foreign secretary. All foreign secretaries in recent memory have had both these stints under their belt. Even in New Delhi Iyer was equally unexceptional, with stopovers as joint secretary (South) and additional secretary (Emigration, Passport and Visas) at the MEA headquarters. Still, she does have strengths recommending her case. In this day and age, the most important of these is the fact she is a woman. She is also the topper of her batch of '64 and the second seniormost in the foreign service. Moreover, she is from Sikkim. When she joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1964, Sikkim was still a protectorate but a special agreement between Sikkim and India permitted Sikkim nationals to join the Indian civil services. Her northeast connection is something Iyer likes to play up. Which might have been why she chose to wear the baku (traditional Sikkimese dress) to work during her days at South Block. All that has helped, especially as the government chose to make the foreign secretary's appointment 'a statement on its forward looking social policy'. Though Iyer was actually born and brought up in Darjeeling where most of her family still lives. She studied at the Loreto School there. 'I am a pure Darjeeling product,' she reportedly said in an interview from Dublin. Some of Iyer's colleagues from her 1964 batch who concur that she doesn't have the required experience, still say she is 'earnest and can pick up even if she doesn't have the background'. Another old friend of Iyer's - 'I knew her from the days we would all go swimming together,' he laughs - says that the 'domesticated' Iyer is 'very friendly, charming and gracious'. Qualities which may, or may not, make a good foreign secretary. 'The appointment of someone like Iyer is an important indication though of how the government might now be looking at the post on the whole,' says one foreign affairs expert. 'With Jaswant Singh being such an active foreign minister, the entire ministry has come to be associated with him. This has really reduced the role of the foreign secretary quite a bit. In that context one candidate is as good as another, because possibly the government isn't really looking for anyone high-profile any more.' In which case appointing Iyer was really not such a bad decision after all. After waiting for 53 years to choose a woman, and that too of Sikkimese origin, the government has got a chance to be perfectly politically correct. And the new soft-spoken 50-something foreign secretary is hardly about to make herself heard now.