It is Official

Pawan Verma

MODERN TIMES are indeed complex. People who spend hours looking for work spend hours looking at it, once they get the job. In some cases this infatuation is so strong that the thin line dividing home and office, work and leisure is completely blurred. It was just the other day that my neighbor, a government employee, was sitting at the breakfast table, engrossed in the morning newspaper. As he asked for yet another cup of coffee, his wife shouted back, “what’s wrong with you? Look at the time. Are you not going to office today?” “Office?”, said my startled neighbor, “I thought I was in the office itself.”

A study of both the government sector and the public sector management would reveal one common inadequacy – they do not recognize talent. In both these sectors there are umpteen number of people whose talents are so rich and diverse that it makes them consider their routine jobs dull and drab and look for alternative channels of creativity. This realization dawned upon me a few years ago when I was interviewing some of our employees for promotion. When I asked one young girl if she had any exceptional talents, she was quite forthcoming in mentioning her achievements in solving crossword puzzles and slogan-writing contests. I interrupted her to say that I was talking about something which could be done during office hours. She was vehemently reassuring, “Believe me, sir, it was all during office hours only.”

And then there are people who claim to work for those who work for their institution. They are the conscience-keepers of the institution. They would not mind exploiting the management in order to prevent the management from exploiting them. If in their busy schedule, they forget to avail of even small work-breaks, it is because of their inherent belief that work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. The entire Indian working class owes its gratitude to them for the pioneering idea that pension could start even before retirement.

The greatest invention of today is – tomorrow. I am sure it must have been done either by a government official, or a public sector executive. For them one tomorrow is worth many todays. They would do anything to avoid thinking and expect you to do so as well. Consider, for example, the question on a job application form of a government office: “Have you or any of your relatives ever committed suicide?” But what is important is that they are happy within the empire built by them. As somebody who hopped over from the private business to a police job, remarked, “The hours are satisfactory, the pay is good and best of all, the customer is always wrong.”

Every new day brings home to me the realization that my education of the government and public sector is incomplete. Their agenda is still unfinished as I discovered while talking to a friend who works for a government software project. With vision in his eyes and jingle in his voice, he said to me, “We have developed a computer that’s almost human.” “You mean it can think like humans,” I said. “No” was his reply, “but when it makes a mistake, it can put the blame on another computer.”

(First Published in The Hindustan Times, Edit page, dated 14.12.1999)