Utopian Dream

Patience is a hallmark virtue of the hindu community. And therefore they wait indefinitely for things to improve. After all India is not Egypt where the populace does not tolerate the excesses of the government and walks out of the confines of their comfortable homes to throw out a government that they had voted in power. After all the definition of a democracy is a government of for and by the people, yet how many of us are able to appreciate it I wonder?

Watching the affairs of successive governments in the nation for a considerable time now, I am convinced that the nation is not conducive enough for the habitation of the aam Hindustani and has strangely emerged as a place where only the men in power and those rolling in cash can live in relative peace. For the aam aadmi however it is a land of non-stop turmoil and anguish and therein lies the tragedy of the journey of this great civilization.

In recent history, utopia was first presented to the populace in 1942 when the call to quit India was issued. The naïve populace then believed that everything would be fine once the britishers left, however that was not to be. The hopes that built up in the initial years post independence took a nosedive in the early sixties when famines and acute scarcity of food grain rocked the nation. Meanwhile the political class as well as the bureaucrats had turned wise and realized that being a self seeker is definitely the far better alternative. It was obvious that the nation had arrived and had started taking off in a skewed direction.

Fed up with successive governments, the populace turned towards the opposition parties in the mid seventies and formed the first non congress government that disappointed more than it enthused. Subsequent experiments with different shades of governments both at the federal and the state levels also proved that there is not much to choose between the devil and the deep sea, with each initially offering hope and then dashing it against the wall.

The series of scams that surfaced with amazing regularity in the recent past have however imparted a different dimension to the concept of governance in this nation. The people who govern, now firmly believe that their anointment on the seat of power gives them a right to loot and plunder for their personal gains. Yet they also like all others never fail to present a utopia whenever an opportunity arises, and the naïve populace continues to believe them perhaps for lack of options.

The utopian dream rocks and our slide downward continues unabated.

Of Think Tanks......

Why the country is fond of "expert committees" and "think tanks" is what I am unable to comprehend. That the fundamental issues are blatantly visible to one and all and they just require a common sense approach for their solution is also widely appreciated. Yes, our zeal to assign even mundane matters to expert committees and think tanks is deplorable, yet it serves a purpose. The purpose is to delay taking any decision and continue with the status quo.

All the various national committees constituted by all and sundry are actually forums for networking and continuously dwelling on mundane issues. They also serve ideally for keeping issues on the back-burner while its members can wine and dine in five star surroundings in the garb of finding solutions. The farcical nature of such committees forced me to resign from one of them recently, in disgust of course.

This non appreciation of highly visible issues has to end. All of us from the sarkari sector, especially those in charge of affairs within their domain have to step forward and handle issues head on, in complete disregard of the price that they may have to pay even for doing developmental works in right earnest. After all we are paid to do a job, a specific job that the nation seeks of us and that job can never be to deal in the mundane stuff.

How I wish that the Prime Minister places a complete ban on creating committees of any kind in the sarkari sector. Let the sarkari mulazims handle issues based on their understanding of the same without seeking advice, support and guidance of all and sundry even for mundane issues.

The learned man on the street!

Ask the man on the street, what ails the country, and he would know. Having been wedded to the tourism sector for a long time, almost everyone, I knew or met had a word of advice for me. How tourism can be made to prosper in the beautiful state of Madhya Pradesh, or in "Incredible India", everyone knew the answers. And now on the hot seat of DRM/Delhi, I am again swamped with intelligent people, people who know what is wrong and how to set it right, except that they do not have even the foggiest idea of what putting your backside on the hot seat entails.

The tragedy is that the credibility of the sarkari tantra in our motherland is abysmally low. And therefore the entire populace, who also have contributed to the chaos in no small measure, chose to bash the tantra at the slightest provocation.

What however really hurts is the feigned ignorance, not of the man on the street, but of the men who matter, with exceptions of course. It is really sad that we often confuse symptom with the disease, and the attempts therefore of trying to cure the symptom, not the disease are bound to fail resulting in repeated cycles of inventing the wheel ad infinitum.

There is no doubt that the sarkari tantra, across the country is a classic example of how tantra's should not be. Procedure orientation, knee jerk responses to symptoms, rampant corruption and sycophancy are its hallmarks. But for a change it was a nice feeling to witness the Government support to the chief executive of Air India in recent moments of crisis and when the gentleman who is trying to do his best needed the support. But such occasions are rare. Rather than supporting the chief executives, they are often made a scapegoat for pleasing the man on the street, who is amused no doubt, but rarely pleased.

who will do it

The recent Delhi tourism conclave concluded on the note that the recommendations of the conference should monitored by the body for implementation. The conference as usual saw generation of a lot of ideas by experts of various shades and hues. I was feeling pity for the organizer, the MD of the DTTDC who was the only one in the large gathering who had the responsibility for implementation. Rest all were free to generate ideas, rapidly.
That precisely is the problem of Hindustan, the country that has almost everyone full of ideas and suggestions, but has very few people who have the capability to convert an idea into a reality through the maze of a variety of rules and procedures. The situation is so complex that it almost borders on the hilarious.
Why is it so? Why have we made deliverance impossible in a country that almost begs its inhabitants for deliverance. For we have everything, a rich culture, a glorious past, unmatched legacy, brilliant people, but we do not have deliverance on the scale it should be witnessed.
And we accept the nonsense. We accept that the present way of doing things is sacrosanct and that deliverance is not. And so we have a complicated bureaucracy, almost the mother of all bureaucracies that is hell bent on complicating matters, by the day and gloating in its remaining maddeningly busy without even producing a lemon.
We have to accept that there is a problem in the way our country handles its problems, its deliverance. Our refusal to accept the same is the source of the problem. For if we dont even accept the existance of the problem, we shall never move even an inch in the direction of resolving it.

The true path is different

I firmly believe that our way of doing things is definitely the wrong way, be it any sector, state or organization in the sarkari sector. Otherwise how does one justify our "bottom of the heap" ranking amongst the nations of the world.
If our way was the right one, our country would have been in the top fifty, but at present that seems like utopia.
Why the hell, this simple thought does not come to the majority of us, the top shot nincompoops of the nation? And why the hell it should come, because we are forever busy satisfying the unsatiable, the proven system and mechanism of non deliverance.
All my visits overseas have reinforced this belief of mine, that what we are doing is wrong and the way we are attempting it is even more wrong. But it is always easy to tread the oft beaten path and therefore we are where we are. Reckless chaos is what I would term the sarkari way of working in our country, but it keeps us terribly busy and satisfied. After all diferentiation between delivery and remaining busy is what we have been unable to learn even after spending a lifetime in service of the self, not of the people.
Overworked but underutilized as opposed to underworked but overutilized is the scenario in which I find myself and my colleagues in, almost all of the time.
When shall we change things physically on the ground?

Should we be doing it?

I often wonder whether, even though we can and also shall, we should be organizing the commonwealth games. The moot point is whether a country that is unable to provide twenty hours supply of drinking water and electricity even to the citizens of its capital city should be organizing an extravaganza like the commonwealth games? Does a capital city where many of its citizens have to carry out their daily morning ablutions in the open, quite often along the railway tracks deserves to organize a sporting extravaganza the outlay on which could have served its inhabitants in a much better way?
And to top it all, the decision makers also appear keen to bid for the olympics! The prospect and also the implications of this decision makes me shudder.
Opinions may vary, but the fact remains that a person deprieved of the basic necessities and also the basic dignity that a human being deserves shall remain unconcerned. The games shall definitely touch the lives of the high and mighty, but the lives of almost ninety percent of its citizens shall remain untouched. The event, by no stretch of imagination can instill a sense of pride in the common man, as is being widely expected in the elite circle.
After all, for a man sitting on a heap of waste and refuse, the talk of pride in the nation is surely a long shot. Not worth attempting, but shall we ever learn? Never, despite being almost at the bottom of the list of nations, and that is why we are where we are.
This republic day, let us all pledge to attempt excellence and pull the nation out of the abyss it finds itself in rather that rejoicing in the transient extravaganza that the games really are!

Experts on advising others

My belief that we indians as a society are experts on advising others is getting stronger by the day. Ask any man on the street how the nation can go forward, and he would know. Everyone, each one of us has an opinion on how the nation should be run, how the railways can do better even under extreme climatic conditions or how the airlines should tackle problems during fog, how the crime rate can be reduced, how economic prosperity can be brought about or evn how to improve cities. What we do not know or rather do not appreciate is how we should be doing our own jobs.
We believe and quite often take pride in being busy, even though the deliverance might be zero. And that is the tragedy of our nation. We all believe in cleanliness even though we would like someone else to ensure it while at the same time we can continue to litter and make this country a giant dust bin. Since coming back to the railways, my conviction on this front is getting stronger by the day. I find it rater surprising that so far I could not locate even one establishment or evn one small room in this gigantic establishment that can be called clean and/or orderly by decent standards.
Perhaps the reason for such and many other similar issues lies in our inability to govern this nation properly, a fact that is amply reflected through our ranking on various international indices. I hope for the sake of the nation, that we as a society should mature as early as possible. Amen.