Words of Wisdom

Rajesh Agarwal had the entire audience in a trance for almost two hours. Addressing over two hundred officers and supervisors at the motivational seminar organized by the IRSME association of the northern railway, the most important point that Rajesh emphasized was the need for a good character, the sheer absence of which is plaguing almost the entire sarkari sector cutting across states and services and the railways is no exception.

The uniqueness of such talks lies in their sheer absence as the focus of various service associations remains confined generally to organizing drink and dinner parties for their members. Welfare is never at the core or even in the fringes of the activities of such service associations. Yet my recent stress on giving a new dimension to the activities of the IRSME was overtly welcomed by almost everyone and that is ample evidence of a hidden desire for change and improvement even amongst the officer clan of the railways, of whom I have always been a silent critic all along. 

My biggest find in the over three decades of active service is that people are indeed waiting to be led to a land of milk and honey, even if it necessitates toil and sweat and also a need to be on the right side of perfect value systems. Rajesh also emphasized on the need for organizations and their constituents to lay stress on value systems that are indeed the building blocks of a good society as well as organizations. Yet in my long service, with the exception of perhaps two, I did not come across bosses who even once mentioned the need for organizations to lay stress on character and value systems. Sad the entire scenario is, yet the saving grace is the silent acceptance of the goodness that lies in being good, even by those who have crossed the fine line that defines the threshold of integrity of both the financial and professional kind.

Rajesh helped clear the cobwebs that had perhaps started forming inside my head since the last couple of weeks. He reinforced clarity on various fronts and laid at rest doubts that may have started surfacing about the need to be genuine almost always despite the entire environment being on the contrary. The sheer irrelevance of many issues that earlier kept the mind preoccupied silently dawned on me. 

The fall of icons!

The most glaring symptom of a society of mediocres is in the manner they treat their icons. While the icons are revered till the going is good, they start getting reviled at the slightest hint of reversal of fortunes. And this is precisely what is happening with our greatest national icon, Sardar Manmohan Singh. From the high pedestal on which the nation placed him in the early nineties for his economic reforms and even in the early period of the UPA-1 for his integrity and commitment, he has already come many notches down with many more to follow. Yet even his high pedestal built over a lifetime of integrity and sincerity has proved to be inadequate against the rising tide of scams, scamsters and mediocrity in this forever developing nation.

It is indeed sad that the mediocrity has not spared even Sreedharan, the man who single handedly built the Konkan railway and the Delhi Metro, both of which changed the faces of the territories they covered. Yes, it is with a tinge of sadness that I sense malicious satisfaction even on the IRSME site when rank mediocres having no claim to fame, pick up straws to unsuccessfully pull down this greatest of the greats.

Yes, most of us relish attempts to pull down icons and regale at the fall for that is symptomatic of the vincibility of all those whom we placed a notch higher than mere humans. The thought that the icon  is also like us with human follies or we are also almost like him is what most of us of the mediocre variety then merrily relish.

The media invariably has a heyday, almost every day in our nation. There is almost always someone fairly high up in the hierarchy whose neck is on the chopping block for his acts of omission or commission. And so keen is the public to lap up the ugly that all negatives that are written or said about the high guy are accepted at face value. Pronounced guilty without a trial is generally the scenario.

When will all this change for the better? Will we ever move on from the society of crabs that we have become? Indian crabs who will never appreciate one of them moving up and out of the dirty basket that they all have been occupying for long. Till then we shall remain in the “developing” league, perhaps till eternity.

Amen!    

Restructuring Railways

The ongoing debate on the IRSME site about the superiority of SCRA vs DR has me totally foxed. While on the one hand one longs for the much awaited IRS (Indian Railway Service), their is still a band of people who would prefer to continue with the divide in the mechanical cadre, one of the nine disciplines of the railways.

It is rather sad that the railways, unlike other sectors of the government, failed to evolve with the times and sadly so, for want of a strong decision maker have preferred the status quo since the time the country came on her own in 1947. So while the nation is managed by one service, namely the IAS, the railways is (mis)managed by nine, with each service having a narrow sectoral focus and none, none of its officers having the capability to take an overall view.

The separation of the railway budget from the general exchequer, sometime in the early nineteenth century was done primarily on commercial considerations. It was felt by the british that the railways being a commercial organization would need flexibility in its finances and hence this decision. Unfortunately the railways have emerged as an extremely rigid organization, more rigid that even the typical government departments, thereby nullifying the original objectives of this decision.

The contractual mechanisms and typical decision making processes in the railways are rigid and archaic. Perhaps this is due to the lack of a will to change, a situation that has occurred primarily due to the multiplicity of services on the system.

It is high time, the railways get a chief executive who looks beyond the narrow confines of his service and pulls us out of the abyss we find ourselves in.