Skip to main content

Damn the peace, give me a club membership

The privilege of being an administrative service officer in the sub-continent are many. While the usual seniority-driven protocol exists for promotions and postings, they all come together when it comes to perks such as overseas jaunts, and membership to elite clubs. 
I have a pretty dim view of some of these bureaucrats. I know a number of them in the service, but the administrative and foreign service breed are a tad different from officers who belong to the revenue, or railway services; the latter are what I would term technical specialists, with measurable, outcome-driven jobs. Some in the IAS too have such jobs, but a huge number of them seem to, at least to the public eye, very little accountability, and a lot of authority. And when I see them lounging around in clubs, ostensibly talking governance over a beer, or at the ninth hole during regular working hours, I wonder.
I wonder whether our terrible dislike for the political class has been exacerbated by the under-performance of this bureaucratic class that sees privileges such as club memberships par for the course, and citizen services as an aside?
I feel like shaking them out of this intoxication, to this "very English upper-crust" lifestyle, and make them take their job seriously. And ask them to get the hell out if they cannot perform.
Having lived in Singapore for a lengthy period of time, I continue to be impressed with the work ethics of our IAS counterparts in that island nation. They are on the job earlier than the rest of their department staff, they are eminently accessible, their performance is measured and put up for public scrutiny, and laggards are pushed out of the system, or given obscure punishment posts. Accountability is high, and so is authority. And systems and processes are in place to deliver an outcome that directly impacts a citizen.
I sometimes feel our breed live in total isolation, disconnected from reality. How else can you explain a diplomatic spat between two warring nations, that is making headlines, over a measly club membership?
Clubbing woes of Indian, Pakistan diplomats

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Will The Nation State of Pakistan Survive?

I know, I know…. I am not a political junkie, and some of my friends and acquaintances know a lot more about the geopolitics of South Asia than I can ever aspire to know, but let me just take a stab at this subject, to partially quench my intellectual curiosity. Of course blogs and social media are hardly the medium for such conversations; it has the tendency to provide a platform where animated discussions can quickly degenerate into a slugfest. But let me still take the plunge. The title is of course eyeball grabbing, quite unintentionally though. That is however the nub of my story, if at all you may call this a story. So let me get to the point right away. If Pakistan continues its current trajectory, it may not last - not a few decades, not a few years, but not even two years. Yes, Pakistan as we know I suspect will cease to exist as a nation, for not a day more than 75 years since its birth, if trends were to be believed. And its demise may have nothing to do with a nuclear...

The King is Dead. Long Live The King.

1984. I was in Kolkata on a business trip. I was watching life go by through the large bay windows at our office, sipping hot chai, when I noticed a flurry of activity. Shops pulled their shutters down rapidly, swarms of buses pulled across to block streets and white cars with flags wove dangerously through a melee of people scurrying away. I soon learnt why. Indira Gandhi had been shot. We closed business and wound our way back home. I innocently agreed to walk a frightened sardarji to a safe house couple of miles away. Having safely deposited him in his gurudwara, I ducked, hid and ran the eleven miles back to the guest house I was staying in as I watched, without comprehension, mobs with hate-filled eyes go after people that till then were woven into the fabric of the city. That day, I saw hate and anger like never before, and read more about it the next day. A small part of me died that day.   Many years later, I was visiting my city, Mumbai for an extended stay. Singapore had...

The making of a new India?

I recently read an Economist article headlined “India’s prime minister is not as much of a reformer as he seems”. Coming from a reputed international newsmagazine, it was a bit surprising that such an impactful headline, was not followed up with depth or detail to make the point stick. From an economic standpoint, almost every ill - near bankruptcy of large PSU banks, poor tax compliance, massive bureaucracy in state sales tax (to a point that almost every state collected just about enough sales tax to pay the wages of the taxmen - yes, does it not surprise you?) that delivered zero meaningful revenue to the state, are a throwback of the past. Whether it was due to 63 years of Congress rule, 2 years of Janata Party rule, or 5 years of the previous BJP rule is not relevant; this, and every previous government inherited a plethora of problems that were/are extremely tough to untangle. It is a fact that every government of the past, especially the one with Janardhan Poojary as a min...