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The Rightness of Things
- By S. Shankar Menon
Last Sunday, at the apposite sounding Peshwa Room of the Pune Holiday Inn, over 700 hopefuls for the civil services gathered in eager glow. The intensity and intelligence on those faces of diverse backgrounds was a joy to see.
The Chanakya Academy from Delhi with a great record of getting aspirants into the All India Services was making a pitch to start their activities in this state and was better than the educational capital of Pune.
Drifting in with me to the back of the packed hall was a very old buddy Sarwar Karim. His father joined the ICS in 1930 and died very soon while DM, Chaibasa. Sarwar made his way in the corporate world and I was in his city trying to induct him into the mysteries of golf.
The high point of any visit for me to this great city is to go to a more obscure part of the changing room of the golf club and see my name as the only post-Independence civil servant to have won a trophy when I was posted here in 1972. None of those present looked likely to threaten that dubious distinction, they would certainly have very more of their own.
The tone of the evening certainly suggested that. Speeches were made by Bhojwani, the educationist involved in getting the Delhi academy to Pune. A.K. Mishra, the Chanakya director and Manish Ranjan, their recent star who came fourth in the combined examination this year. Once more it seemed that public speaking in English may well be in Sanskrit or Pali these days. Rolling cadences of the Jharkhand patois is the general voice of much of the higher levels of administration and possibly, not a day too soon.
Form is being increasingly replaced by content. Those of us who had to deal with some of the venal last lot of the ICS and a war recruit (second, of course), who while secretary, education, did not know the subtleties that distinguished primary from secondary, can only raise a hurrah at these eager boys and girls from Ferguson, Wadia, Symbiosis, SP and other well known colleges of Pune trying to find out more about the blanket mystique of the civil services.
Unfortunately portrayed by the Chanakya director as all about power and grandeur of the DM and the SP. Had someone pointed to an interloper in their midst and asked my opinion, I would have gladly said that the civil service is mainly about the rightness of things. This is what I tried to emphasise when I was director of the state government institute in 1980, preparing students for the UPSC.
It's nice to think the results that year were the best ever. Two are about to become ambassadors, one is an accountant general and two at least are secretaries to state governments. Many years later, I opened a newspaper on a flight and saw one of my students mentioned as killed in an air crash, a truly horrifying few days until it appeared it was another unfortunate person with the same name.
Rightness of things means of course to have an endless curiosity reflected to begin with, in original answers in the examination. This, the UPSC state, is what they look for. Then as the bureaucrat goes along, there could be a strong centre around which he can make up his mind about what is right and what is not.
The great nihilism of Upamanyu Chatterjee's English August is superb for starters, but the complete collapse of the main characters in the two later novels is because there is no credo in which they have absolute faith. The newest recruit Manish spoke to a riveted audience in the Peshwa Room about the need for focus and time management while preparing for the IAS and other exams. This, of course, can be said of all tests ahead.
Yet, while in most professions, it seems important to be well clued to the rightness of particular things, sitting in that huge hall and looking back over the years, many of my outstanding colleagues had a vast spread in my mind for the rightness of an incredible variety of things. Whether it was an improvement in the cropping pattern of a district, tapping of small savings for the rural householder or working within the system to clear cities and towns when traditional political wisdom decreed these as impossibilities.
All of them worked long and hard years away from the limelight of the front pages or even prime-time frippery. Many of the boys and girls present last Sunday evening looked to me ready for these enormous challenges.
The Chanakya Academy charges substantially for their efforts. I remembered how I had got together recently nine eager NCC girls who wanted to join the IPS, most of them daughters of friends, and I couldn't even think of a fee.
With great amusement, I see that in a recent issue of their very useful magazine on general knowledge, an article on a specialised aspect of crime is written by a friend recently removed by a special order of the President for having appropriated material from cross-border terrorists. Another article in the same magazine is about the wonders of Teflon, which my dismissed police friend could have read with profit only a few months ago.
The Chanakya Academy director mentioned with tongue in cheek how their efforts at a similar get together of civil services hopefuls in Ranchi had ended in chaos. Maybe some of these earnest young persons present in Pune will end up in that state and change things around in a decade or two. That certainly will be in the rightness of things.
Spavined mules know all the rules, suspects sshankarmenon@hotmail.com
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