Complex trivialities!

Handling simple issues the complex way has perhaps become the bane of the nation.

I simply fail to understand why things cant’ be accepted at their face value. I am also unable to appreciate the national penchant to look for complicated solutions for every single issue, in official as well as personal arenas. One of my biggest realization has been that even technical issues, a large majority of them have simple solutions far removed from technicalities.

The problem is more acute in the official arena, perhaps because for most of us sarkari blokes, nothing really matters except those that have a direct bearing on our personal comforts and career advancement. To hell with delivery, yet the need to appear intelligent leads to the ongoing search for complicated solutions to simple issues. After all how can a sarkari babu defend his salary when he has no intention of delivering, is not delivering and also does not appear to be doing so.

Accepting situations, the people around it and also what the people say, at their face value is perhaps the best way to lead our lives. Yet the sheer mistrust that pervades the sarkari environment like mist prompts people in accepting situations and people with considerable distortions. Yet those who place their bets on a face value acceptance invariably end up as winners not in the traditional but in the true sense.

Gandhi has been the biggest mystery of the twentieth century. How can a mere human be so divine, yet so powerful so as to take on singlehandedly the mightiest empire of his times, the nation has always wondered? Perhaps his strength lied in his simplicity and also the purity of his soul. His mind devoid of any devious thought process always came out with simple ingenious solutions that worked and ultimately led to freedom for the nation. His belief in the goodness of men regardless of caste, creed or nationality and his total penchant for truth gave him a larger than life persona that the entire nation followed and worshipped.

Yet the land of the Mahatma despite partaking of his accomplishments has indeed failed in imbibing the basic tenets of his life. Therein lies the biggest tragedy of Bharatvarsh.

The wake up call

Connaught Place today is the most visible symbol of all that is wrong with "Bharat". I call it the visible mess of the nation. The state of affairs at the Connaught Place is symptomatic, symptomatic of a much deeper malaise within the sarkari tantra of the nation.

That Bharat is not what it was, is already widely known and appreciated. What most of us perceive as our nation is not what "Bharat" is all about. The intelligentia and the upper crust from which most of us from the ruling classes hail, does not have even the foggiest idea of what "Bharat" is all about. A land of abject poverty and deprivation, a land of mind boggling gaps in infrastructure and a land of glaring contrasts. The real "Bharat" lives in its villages, most of which are underdeveloped beyond imagination.

What one also fails to appreciate at first glance is the deep rooted mess that we actually are in. Realization dawns upon us only during mega events like the ensuing CWG when the mess that we are in, severely hampers our ability to deliver even "passable" quality on a large canvas. This realization is perhaps the best gift that CWG has given us, the finest wake up call that we have received in over sixty three years of existence as a free nation.

But will we ever wake up, is the question that continued to haunt me even before the arrival of the latest wake up call. Do we, the bureaucrats of "Bharat" ever want to wake up? Do we, the bureaucrats of "Bharat" have any stake in taking the wake up call? Are we not comfortable in the corrupt mess that we find ourselves in, and yet aspire to climb onto the top of the garbage heap?

The wake up call is neither for the politicians, nor for the masses. It is for US, the bureaucrats of "Bharat" whom one British playwriter aptly described as a bunch of bumbling nincompoops.

We better wake up now!

Procedures override deliverance

I often wonder, where did we go wrong in the last sixty odd years. Why despite a stable democratic system inherited after centuries of foreign rule and oppression, Bharatvarsh did not really take off? Why, on the economic front we are still at the bottom of the list of nations. Why even basic infrastructure like decent roads and highways were non-existent till now, and it required a major resolve to start building them at a pace unimaginable, only a couple of years earlier. How is it that every Bharatvasi who leaves our shores becomes a success story, despite being an abysmal failure in his own motherland? Why, Why, Why, Why and Why. These Why’s, I think will haunt me to my grave.

Yes we all have to start questioning and start asking why? Isn’t it ridiculous that in the system we live in, a procedure or a rule or a policy is easily and almost always allowed to take overriding priority over deliverance? Isn’t it equally ridiculous that the same system lays such a strong premium on non-deliverance that at times the achievers stand the risk of being victimized. And in the process, deliverance suffers and has suffered in the first fifty years of the existence of a free Bharatvarsh.

Why is it so important for a sarkari mulazim to follow rules and procedures without any concern whatsoever about deliverance and output. It is important because in our system there is no demand for and therefore no premium on deliverance. In my twenty nine years of career, I can count on my fingertips, occasions when deliverance of a very basic nature, in the form of acts to be done, not results to be achieved has been asked of me. Career progression nowadays is not based on performance, but on other factors like sycophancy, spinelessness, sweet talk, boss handling, and other similar qualities. Strange, one even thinks about deliverance in such a system!