The fiasco at London

The hockey fiasco at London has indeed hit the country hard. Tall claims and massive campaigns launched prior to the games have fallen flat on the face and the team has set a new record, of losing every single game in its group. The only solace for the team is the equally dismal performance of its arch rivals from across the border. Yet the results are not at all surprising, keeping in view the track record of the nation in matters that have tall claims attached to them till the debacles surface.

Even otherwise the national contingent has performed far below the hoopla built prior to their departure. The current tally of four odd medals, sans gold, puts us at the forty fifth place in the pecking order. Not even a face saving scenario, considering that every sixth human being on this planet hails from our glorious motherland.

The tall expectations that the citizens end up having whenever a national contingent leaves our shores for a sporting extravaganza never fails to surprise me. Surprise because a nation that has been a rank failure in almost all spheres except that of unfailingly notching up its population with amazing speed, is expected to perform in the sporting arena. How the hell is that possible, for how can the mess be all pervasive, yet leave the sporting arena untouched. Our national trait of messing up everything under the sun in its attempt to remain almost always at the bottom of the list of nations cannot be allowed to corrupt itself, just for a few medals. And what are a few medals for the patriarchs of a nation immersed deep in poverty and corrupt practices.

A sterling performance in the sporting arena would need sustained inputs, hard work and perseverance, traits conspicuous by their very absence. The tantra that governs the nation has tied itself into knots and unfortunately has now started believing in its own rhetoric. At a much lower level, I am witness to rhetoric of blasphemous levels in the railways, an organization the mandarins of which have started believing that outputs can be delivered sans inputs and that mere advice instead of support is going to take the organization somewhere. Somewhere it would definitely go, but not forward, is what I am absolutely certain of.

Recently an ex minister said on camera that while all his former secretaries were loyal to him and are now loyal to the current minister, it is unfortunate that the loyalty of the team of secretaries is to the minister and not to the organization. How sad and how true. As long as the loyalty of the servants of the government remains confined to their bosses and not to the nation, fiascoes like the recent one in London shall keep on surfacing  with assured regularity. 

Love for hangers on!

The highly feudal character of railways has given rise to a peculiar trait in recent times that of providing protocol to the higher rank officials. Senior officials demand and get protocol for as mundane an activity as visiting or arriving at railway stations. The higher the official is placed, the higher is the expectation for and from protocol arrangements. The sensitivity of this highly irrelevant practice should never be underestimated as the servility in providing protocol often forms the basis for evaluating an official or a department. The better halves of the protocol hungry officials also leave no stone unturned in reminding the puny officials that they also can be ignored only at the own peril of the junior officials.

I often find it strange that while the really powerful officials of the state like the cabinet secretaries and chief secretaries make do without protocol of any kind, much lowly placed, in the order of their utility to the organization and the nation, officials of the railways cannot step an inch without a senior railway official following in the tow.

The reason for this unusual penchant for hangers on in the guise of protocol arrangement perhaps lies in the rank inability of railway officers as a clan to be able to make any meaningful change in the surroundings that they live in. The absence of satisfaction from ones job invariably leads to deriving a warped sense of power that the protocol arrangements definitely provide to officials who are generally otherwise pygmies, both in stature and in their personal contribution to the organization or the nation.

Railways is perhaps the only organization in the entire nation where officers of the rank of joint secretaries to the government are a dime a dozen. And the organization therefore leaves no stone unturned in regularly reminding them of their worthlessness by assigning them on mundane protocol duties. Perhaps this is another way of showing disrespect for the entire officer clan, by a tribe of officials who have no respect for themselves either.