A Paralyzing sense of Rage & Disbelief

V S Naipaul once wrote “Mumbai is a crowd”. For the next two days after 26 November, the city was everything but that.

A city of many millions was held hostage by 25 or so heartless militants with no trace of humanity whatsoever left in them. It began at the Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station in Mumbai when two men dressed in black dropped their rucksacks, opened them to pull out guns and open fire. What followed next was gruesome and macabre, to say the least. Many accounts of that have been seen on the net and the Television, where news channels have focussed on little else over the last few days and rightly so.

This post (one being written, after an extremely long “Rip Van Winkle”-ish slumber) is no attempt to recount any of those stories or go over what has already been spoken about the entire episode. I live nowhere near Mumbai, have visted the city only once and spent just three days and I know no one in Mumbai who was in any sort of danger during this episode. Yet, I cannot help but sense this overpowering and overhelming sense of numbness descend upon me in these lugubrious times. I do not feel any personal loss, but still experience a feeling much deeper than that.

Maybe it is the anger that some of India’s finest soldiers, commandos and policemen died bravely and ironically fighting a bunch of cowards. Maybe it is the anger over watching an inert Central Government and a useless Home Ministry that has slept through four terrorist attacks in four of India’s biggest cities in four months. Maybe it is the anger that the only Opposition to this inept ruling party tries to gain political mileage out of this terrorist encounter to win an insignificant election in Delhi (why is it being held at this time anyway?). Maybe it is the anger at watching people and media try to confer religion to the “militants” who cannot even be conferred the very sense of humanity.  Maybe it is the anger one feels at watching the moving images of people killed and wounded for no fault of their own. Quite likely, it is all of this and a lot more that has agitated and frustrated me enough that I come back here to vent all those feelings.

The media called this attack “Mumbai’s 9/11”.  Every single news channel claimed that Mumbai has seen a lot of violence in the past along similar lines. But I really do not feel the same way.

The riots in 1993 were a result of total madness and there is absolutely no doubting that.  However, there was at least some sense one could see that those riots were a result of blood-thirsty zealots driven by the passion for retaliation and revenge. When the train blasts happened in 2007, one could see that they were an attempt to unsettle the resilience of the average Mumbaikar in the name of “worthy causes”. The same goes for the blasts in front of the Stock Exchange in 1993 as well.

Forward to the present day in 2008 and I just cannot apply the same line of reasoning. The TV Channels repeatedly displayed images of young men (none of them looked elder than me) clad in jeans and T-shirts wielding scary weapons as casually as the rucksacks strapped around their backs. I might be imagining this, but one of those guys seemed to have an insane glee written all over him with his eyes masking the cruelty that he had just perturbed. As these youngsters headed out from Victoria terminus to Leopold Cafe , one of them saw an old couple curiously peeping out from a neighbouring building. Calmly, he aimed his gun and fired a burst, killing both of them. Now, what wrong did they do to be shot like that?

There seems to be no comprehensible reason at all behind this attack.  Was it an attempt to unsettle India’s tourism industry? Was it an attempt to expose India’s poor security and its vulnerable coastline? Was it an attack made out of jealousy over India’s rising global stature? Was it driven by communal reasons?

These are no new questions. Every Indian would have asked these over the last few days. But I have only one thing to add. I began with one Indian expatriate writer and I end with another Indian writer who, for many, still is synonymous with Indian fiction the world over, R K Narayan.

“Whatever happens, India will survive”.

India’s Civil Dis-Services: Are we to blame for our own neglect?

I recently happened to read an article on the Economist titled ‘What’s holding India back?’ and another article which was linked from within that one titled ‘Battling the Babu Raj’. Both these articles led me to muse a great deal on the state of civil services in the country, and being a part of the enormous and ever-increasing youth of the country, I was led to ponder on the question: “How many of today’s able-bodied and keen youth would want to join the Civil Services in the country?”

My bias against the IAS began, perhaps at the tender age of 9, when I learnt that a member of our family, out of what can be described as “an idealistic zeal”, quite like the heroes of Shankar movies, joined the IAS with a hope to contribute to the nation as a part of the system. What happened, quite predictably and believably, was the contrary. He became fond of throwing his weight around and became a perpetrator of every sin IAS officers in India are accused of. For the benefit of the uninitiated, I refer to bribery and saluting politicians among an entire list of Terrible Commandments that so many civil servants are fond of following! But the point is, in short, the System changed him.

Now, to a different story. In the year 2004, the topper of the Civil Services Entrances was a Computer Engineering B.Tech graduate from IIT-Delhi. To reiterate the point, he was a Computer Engineer from IIT-Delhi and graduated at the height of the IT Boom. He chose not to join a software company, not to pursue studies abroad (like most IITians), and might I have the temerity to add, he did not write the CAT as well. So then, a reporter from our one-and-only ToI-let paper posed this brilliant question to the topper, “By joining the Civil Services, don’t you think you have wasted a valuable opportunity for some other IIT aspirant. After all, your Engineering degree is a waste now, right?”

So then, personal stories apart, what really does ail the Indian Civil Services? In a country that is on such a hot road to prosperity, it is only expected that responsible officers and government servants will play a huge role. The reality, though, is something that I need not state explicitly, but the long-and-short of it is, where the officers should be responsible middlemen and an important cog of a well-oiled machine, they end up becoming necessary devils and the Mr. Hyde of a very vital Dr. Jekyll. And yes, I need not say this, but Bureaucracy is a bad word in our blossoming nation!

The Economist article on the Babu raj that I have linked throws great light on the issue and I would rather not repeat those points. But to give a condensed view of what’s been stated in the article, the quality of IAS recruits is falling due to the following reasons: falling education standards; growing competition for talent from the private sector; increasing political interference; and, above all, caste-based reservations.
Elaborating on each of those points is a painful and needless task, so I would rather skip to add another point, the proverbial truth about the greener grass on foreign shores!

Now, to the point of view of one of the “youth”, being a student in one of the National Institutes of Technology, I do not even have the feeling that I am turning out to be an engineer, let alone, a good one. So, quite frankly, the question of wasting the degree and the professional education does not even arise! Yet, I would not prefer to join the IAS. There could be many reasons to this.

The main reason is a deep-seated resentment against the politicians who rule our country. Come on, which self-respecting individual would like to take orders from a person who isn’t even half as educated and pompous to the core? Worse, butter the wrong side of the bread, and you would definitely be facing your very own version of Lord Ram’s vanavasam. Deplorable as that sounds, it’s completely true!

The second, though I may be mistaken here, is a belief that IAS officers do not actually get to change the way things work. But yes, there are exceptions, like Jaykar Jerome.

On the whole, though, the first reason does dominate. And, there is a third factor, one that I would not like to admit, but yes, at the very depths, it does exist. Other avenues like a high-paying job or the opportunity to study abroad would certainly appear more lucrative at the end of the professional education. Yes, I am talking about money and salaries here.

There ends the frank self-assessment. But that always brings me back to the nagging question: As a part of the large populace that feeds off the rampaging Indian tiger, how will I ever help feed the tiger and ensure that it remains robust?

That is a very large topic in itself and merits a separate blog, let alone a few posts. For now, though, here’s the main theme that I am looking to drive in this blog. The Civil Services are steadily and surely dipping in quality and a large part of this can be attributed to the latest recruits. So, if the quality of the recruits has to improve, it simply implies that better candidates have to apply. In other words, self-respecting candidates like you and me should also look to apply. But, given that we don’t, are we in a correct position to crib about the services and fault them? More significantly, if we do not take the responsibility, the quality of the services is definitely going to fall. And swallow the bitter pill, as the future citizens of this country, won’t this affect us in the later stages of our own lives?

These are questions that I can only but ask. And that is why I take my hat off to the IIT-Delhi 2004 topper! Answering difficult questions in life is usually what sets apart the winners from the losers. And to all you self-respecting geeks, no, I am not referring to difficult exams!!!