C'est Fini Les Amis

A last push

I adopted a multi modal transport approach to arrive at Patiala after the valedictory ceremony. Why is that relevant? There are two aspects to the mode of travel and this day's events that are correlated. The valedictory gathering was addressed by the Honourable President of India. He exhorted the OTs of the 89th Foundation Course to adhere to the tenets of the Constitution, to be responsive to people and to be responsible for the development of the country. In the mass transport systems that I had availed of, a bus to Dehra Dun, a Vikram (7 seater auto) to the ISBT, a bus to Saharanpur, a general compartment train ride to Ambala, a Magic van (8 seater automobile) ride to Patiala, one rubbed shoulders with the people whose principal representative addressed the gathered OTs that very morning. In those ballooning delays, in the grit of the unkempt general compartment and the grime of the public utilities, in the disfunctioning anarchy of the system we misnamed as 'transport', in that dreamy disjointed multimodality, I found the reason for the existence and the cessation of the civil services.

The valedictory function went off without glitches. The Honourable President arrived at the Academy and has had a group photo taken with the officers of the 89th Foundation Course. The Honourable President then addressed the OTs, his employees in the literal sense. The valedictory ceremony was preceded by a mini drama of sorts involving course completion certificate, the OTs and a few palpitating hearts gripped by the fear of failure. The OTs were given a course completion certificate, a copy of the group photo taken few days ago and a sketch of the director's office building by a very talented artistic OT. 

The OTs with the highest marks in various subjects and the OTs who promoted the esprit de corps were awarded prizes by the Honourable President of India.

The 89th Foundation Course came to an end with a lunch in the Officers' Mess. 

Tears were shed, farewells were said, numbers exchanged, selfies clicked and without much ado, the 89th Foundation Course came to an end.

Heart's strings were plucked, a portion in the pit of the stomach went into knots encountering familiar and fond faces, knowing one would not see them as often as one would have wanted. Pretty faces, handsome faces, friendly faces, smiling faces, haughty faces, faces of civil servants all, they will remain in that portion of the brain which specializes in short term memories and will be over written by more immediate faces, a set of 180 faces, a fresh beginning of understanding old faces. What remains in the long term?

What remains in the long term is our conception of reluctant starts to friendships, of awkward remembering of faces and corresponding names, of human bonds and the surprising transformation that urgency has brought about in the nature of relationships. Would we have felt the same way if the Foundation Course was of 5 year duration?

The star ship Mycadea righted itself after the group photo, opened all the vents of the Karamshila Engine Complex, fired all its engines and achieved escape velocity within an hour of address by the First Citizen. However, 180 T-OTs were left behind and they looked on, many with moist eyes, heavy hearts, restless minds, looked on at the departing 104 T-OTs, their friends, lovers, philosophers and guides over the past 111 days.

Godspeed spacefarers!

PS:

As promised, this is the last post on this blog, Labhashana.blogspot.com regarding the 89th Foundation Course. While I debate whether to continue the same title and merely demarcate the Foundation Course section or to start a new blog with a new title and a different ethos, I would like to thank you dear readers for everything and nothing.

My personal objectives for the FC were realized in parts. Weight loss- yes but unsatisfactory. Books read- yes but far too few. Super power attained- Anonymity- worked well but only to an extent.

And that is all folks.

Post Script: I did decide to blog about the 1st Phase. You can read all about the 1st phase here.
https://firstphaser.wordpress.com

Day Minus 2

The two and half day leadership module was wrapped up with a recap of the activities, concepts of leadership and a feedback session.

How is it that the more time one spends in the services, the more one loses the ability to listen? Is it a sign of the closed nature of the services, a lonely job for a bureaucrat shut in a room, surrounded by lackeys and yes men, voiceless echoes of one's own personality and prejudices?

The campus is being prettified on war footing. After all it is not every day that the first citizen of the country comes calling. The stretch of road from Library Point to the Academy (called 'Charleville Road') is being repaired and topped with tar. The sides of the roads have been white washed in pattern with a red dot in the middle. Shiny, blinking things that mark the borders of the road have been affixed. On a small stretch of a straight road, they wink one after another, synchronized road side Romeos.

The last three days may pass in a jiffy. At least this day did. One vaguely remembers hiking till the Little Llama Cafe (again, so soon!), stuffing oneself with legendary momos. And another foray to a restaurant on the Mall road. One returns to the academy on near empty roads save for the irregular traffic of weaving drunkards soliloquizing at length to the push carts and to the lamp posts on love and its failure in redeeming mankind of its common failures. Their steps falter, they say, because love had made an unkind cut. And their words slur, they aver, because no love has ever been spoken that is true love. The thousand tongues the drunkards get are an envy of the tongue-tied.

The three remaining plays of the AK Sinha One Act Play competition were acted out tonight. Two plays took up the humorous path while one play wrestled with a complex script.

Reliable reports indicate that the second day of the leadership module was far more exciting than the first. Less of crayon drawing and more of participatory activities.

The AK Sinha one act play got off to a start with performances by two teams comprising of five counsellor groups each. One group presented a play on the women's safety issue with  hyper realistic depiction of events. Another group presented a  medley of playlets centered around relationships. Three more groups are scheduled to present their plays tomorrow.

There are about 102 OTs to say goodbyes to, to wish fond farewells. And dinners to be had and to squeeze out few more drops of friendship out of two days remaining for interaction.

Just as well. Hopefully one shall come across them in future.

On Leadership and Farewells

Lao Tzu says "A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves."

Is such a leadership suitable for the civil services? Can a civil servant be not seen? Should a civil servant be not seen?

The Leadership Module scheduled over two and half days aims at mapping the leadership competencies of the OTs, the future leaders to use but one cliche. The workshop exercises were heavy on crayon sketching and might have resembled a kindergarten class of overgrown OTs drawing their hearts out while the benevolent faculty looked on.

Preparation for the one act play is in full swing. Natural and unnatural actors are emerging. Hope it will be an entertaining evening. [Full disclosure: I am involved somehow with the play].

It seems only yesterday when I started blogging with a very narrow mandate. I had referred to the quintessential bureaucratic process of 'no-dues.' It is time for the 'no-dues' dance to begin. Books have to be returned, accounts settled with the juice-wallah, the Home Turf, Plaza Cafe, Ganga Dhaba, forgetful Bihari friends and so on.

One has grown fond of the fellows who would be completing their professional training at their respective service's training institutions. Future CAG, Chairperson CBEC, Chairman CBDT etc have made excellent friends. Their presence would be missed. 

Another four days remain for the FC to be wrapped up. I may not get time to say goodbye to most friends owing to the hectic schedule. I thank the readers of this blog for their sustained interest. Without your consistent encouragement it would not have been possible for me to write. If writing the blog is half the picture, you readers sitting in front of monitors or smartphones hearing me out patiently, bearing with my rants and acid laced barbs and bureaucratese infested event updates are the other half.

I may yet continue blogging of events in Phase 1. However, it will not be the same. I may start a new blog for that phase. As of now, these are the last few posts for the 89th FC blog. I have had fun writing, as much as I could. There is nothing of interest to the UPSC Civils aspirants and that is how I meant it to be. No coaching advice, no motivational quotes, no challenges to your dignity or mine.

Notwithstanding anything I might have said in this blog, the Officer Trainees of the 89th Foundation Course batch are unique, purpose driven and ambitious. Most are empathetic, concerned citizens. The Rainbow Batch, as I had called it, shall be looked up at to achieve great things.

On a Sunday walk to Landour

One develops a territoriality, stakes a claim on a specific spot at their frequently haunted place. It is as if one has acquired ownership rights by virtue of planting one's behind on a seat for long. How much more rightful must the peasant feel who tills the land!

The library has a peculiar smell. It is the smell of books of old, the letters, the pages, the ink, the binding and the glue, the pictures, the characters and the abstractions of human thought- all breathe. They inhale and exhale, a smell of knowledge, a smell of parched curiousity quenched by a rain of Dewey Decimals.

One sits and breathes. Forget sometimes to exhale and sometimes to inhale, according as the plot rises or falls.

One gazes out of the window from time to time, a day changes, days change- yesterday is like tomorrow which will be like today. A bird sings in the back ground, melancholia filters through air thick with the spirits of the unread books, thick with the spirits of books thumbed through, licked, torn, highlighted, mutilated, loved, issued, returned, stolen.

The sun rise was spectacular today.

A sunrise to watch

The full moon loomed larger than life while the sun light lit up the tops of the hills one by one.

Full moon crashing on to pine trees

Vincent Hill catching the first light

We figured a revisit to the Lal Tibba might be a good idea, now that the snow peaks seem tantalizingly close. The sky was a fifty shades of blue.

A shade of blue

However, the view itself was a disappointment, from Lal Tibba. For one, the trees block the view. And the two tourist traps of cafes/tea stalls were closed and access to the 'Govt Approved' binoculars was cut off by multiple locked doors. There were other places from where the view was quite good, like the point where the road forks, near chaar dukaan. Swargarohini massif was yellow beryl in the first rays of the sun. The honour passed to the Gangotri range peaks-Srikanta, Kedarnath and Chaukhambha as the sun light found these peaks at length. One can spot the various buildings of the academy from afar. The maligned Polo Grounds look innocuous enough from these great distances.

Spot the Polo grounds if you can

The quiet of Lal Tibba yielded fantastic opportunity for bird watching. The quiet also attracts the quiet minded people.

One can reach Lal Tibba by taxi but the fun is in walking and taking in the sights. Then there is Doma's Inn, a restaurant with kitsch interior decoration.

Cute kitsch.

It is a good place to pack in some calories exhasuted by nearly 2 hours of walking and pack some more for the next two hours of exhausting walk. All in all a day well spent.

On a ruined building and a boring movie

There are good places for a short walk of less than an hour around the academy. One such place is the ruins close to the Mussoorie Modern School. A road branches off to the left when one comes from the Library Point towards the academy. The ruins are visible from afar. One reaches them by a short walk on a gravel path, the stone chips under the shoes sound as if a giant has been munching potato wafers underfoot. The fried variety, not the boiled ones.

The ruined building with a fire place had an eerie feel to it. The roof had caved in and the walls too would follow. The premises were free of tell tale signs of tourist abuse-graffiti, declarations of love etched in to the plaster on the walls, bottles of beer or cheap whisky, ugly plastic wrappers of chips packets etc. 

The neat ruins were a contrasted juxtaposition on the nature of the ruined building. The decency and the cleanliness with which its walls still stood lent some solemnity to the ruins. Access to the building might have been regulated or outright banned for there was a rusted old sign prohibiting trespassers and glaring dire warnings. However, the paint was lost with large flakes of rust and the unkind admonition was ignored, with good results.

Immediately behind the ruins was a rocky outcrop which has the best views in Mussorie and of Mussoorie. Seated there on the ledge, with the sun rising ahead of you, a sapphire blue sky above you and yellowish green mist and grass and the trees beneath you, one can see the snow peaks and the massifs (Swargarohini, Bandarpunch, parts of the Gangotri range) to the north, Dehra Dun to the south east and the twin towns of Mussoorie and Landour to the north and the north east. A near panoramic view.

One dreads the day when one has to leave these hills and the pleasant winter mornings and go back to the grey, dreary, joyless cities, crowded, polluted, soulless artificialities dead to beauty.

An occasional foray to Dehra Dun reinforces the dread. Add to the toxic fumes and the intemperate city spirit a headache of a movie, the 3D version of Exodus: Kings and Gods and etc. Ridley Scott terrorized us with Prometheus with atrocious dialogues as this.

"Janek: You know, if you wanna get laid, you really don't have to pretend to be interested in the pyramid scan. I mean, you could just say, "Hey, I'm trying to get laid." Heh.
Meredith Vickers: I could. I could say that, right? But then it wouldn't make sense why I would fly myself half a billion miles from every man on Earth if I wanted to get laid, would it?
Janek: Hey, uh, Vickers. Hey, Vickers. I was wondering... Are you a robot?
Meredith Vickers: [scoffs] My room. Ten minutes."

He continues the streak with Exodus too. There seems to be a prudish turn to Scott which makes him approach the subject of sex with stilted dialogue.

This is but a minor niggle compared to the lugubrious length of two and half hours aided by a very thin, familiar biblical plot. In the end there is only so much a director can imagine and it shows. The only effort seems to be in trying to provide a pseudo scientific explanation to the 10 plagues visited on the Egyptians by the god of the Jews. This effort too gets abandoned midway. The movie therefore was a disappointment.

The last week of FC is hard upon us. And so are the deadlines for pulling a rabbit out of one's hat and organize the one act play. A last gasp of strenuous activity.

The academy wore a deserted look today on account of a host of people going home for the weekend, the usual Delhi suspects, people taking part in river rafting at Rishikesh, organized by the Adventure Club and by people visiting the Rajaji National park.

On a sunset

The sun set on the 3rd of December was the best so far.

The Himalayas were mountains of the moon, shining jagged pieces of blemished silver, looked so sharp and bright as if pain got personalized and projected on to looming granite. Lustrous. The sun did its business for the day and came home for the night, met by the blushing mountains, blushing of the night ahead.

The valleys filled with a gray black haze, a miasma arising from the depths of the earth and filling up the hollows, the crooks and the deepnesses of the valleys while the sunlight fled up the slopes, anti gravitic, hurried and ungentlemanly. The darkness was the ink into which an accidental writer dipped his pen and sketched scenes from memory.

Motor cars turned corners on roads stencilled in to the hill sides, their headlamps intermittent fireflies. Or they were sprites of the seas playing peekaboo with the intense looking sailor gazing at them from the portholes of the upside down star ship Mycadea. The sailor plodded midway through a thin book of stars to chart a course for Mycadea. It was slow work, involved turning pages aided by the infrequent wetting of the index finger tip to provide a grip. The sailor was confused, tired and he clicked the pages with his index finger thinking they were virtual. He felt stupid and so gazed out of the window. It has been 93 days since Mycadea crashed on to this strange sad planet. He had been asked to plot a course to Phase 1 star system. He did not understand the point of the exercise when their star ship was stuck headfirst on a hill on earth. How was the captain planning on getting them unstuck, for instance? How would they be airborne? Do they have enough fuel even to upright themselves? He had no answer and the captain was his usual inscrutable silly self. The cadre comet was a fizzle compared to the anticipation it created. The Toughened Operational Turnips (T-OTs) had already calculated the trajectory and the probable crash points of the comet and braced themselves.

Exhaust vents of Mycadea

The middle ranges were bald nude brown in the sun light and in the rapid night rise were menacing hulks of negative space. Villages on the slopes shone in clusters of light and, to the sailor disoriented by his thoughts, they looked like boats tossed about by gigantic waves. The star ship made sense, but it has capsized, and the aliens and the T-OTs were breathing air trapped under the belly of the boat.

He felt heroic, clever even, for having thought of this analogy. He felt sea sick too, imagining the mountains as waves and himself as driftwood. The villages must be underground cities, populated by pretty mermaids. He thought of all the hill women he saw, prettier than pearls. He wondered if he could stay back on this planet, live in a village for a while, love a lovely hill woman, move to another village, love another woman, an itinerant romantic in eternal search for happiness.

Just then the captain Chip Spik bellowed at him for day dreaming when on the job. He wanted the course on his desk five minutes ago and warned the sailor that in case he falls behind schedule one more time he will be delivered to Ming the Merciless.

 

On Impossible Trinity

It is not always vitriol and vinegar. Oftentimes one gets touched by the terrible cuteness of it all. Techno-managerial-bureaucrats pooling in resources, joining purpose, attaching minds and hearts to solve intractable problems of how to score more marks and rank above the next person is a heartening sight. A mark here or there is all that determines whether one becomes a cabinet secretary or a chief secretary or a nobody. It is that tough, this intense competition, this dog-eat-dog-eat-dog-eat-dog-eats chowmein and momos world. Tough, tough, tough. And amidst this chlorinated atmosphere, this pungent, vitiated air, there are heartwarming stories of romance, budding love, pink and rose hued shades of friendship, of group studies in groups in which oftentimes one has eyes for only one or more, of congregations in the hostel lounges, of currency in slide handouts, justice, welfare, maintenance all mingling in cloying displays of affection and equal parts tension. What of the time when one is in the field, that far away, exotic la-la land of red, blue and amber beacons and four score retinues and the forefathers breathing down one's neck?

A possible trinity but an impossible threesome. Alas!

Here is an impossible trinity for you. Dinner at Momo's, dinner at Little Llama, desserts at Clock Tower Cafe or Rockby all in the same day. That came out all wrong, it is quite possible.

Let us try again. Fixed exchange of hearts, open bank account and autonomy in marriage policy. Ha! Got you.

A good thing about the exam is that the whole batch is exempted from PT. Hurray!

On Eerie Silences

There is an eerie silence in the academy. The corridors of Ganga hostel are empty. One's footsteps echo in the emptiness. The ramp up to the academic block is devoid of movement. Even the frisky monkeys seem to have abandoned their friskiness for far weightier matters. The Happy Valley hostel corridor and the A.N. Jha Plaza are vacant. The piped music plays to the cold gallery and the air does not stir, nor the blades of grass nor the stone cold cast iron benches nor the sodium vapour lamps sending out crystal yellow rays to a December night. Ganga dhaba's daily profit dipped few crores due to the sudden evaporation of footfalls. The music system at the gym plays out peppy songs with unintelligible lyrics and the treadmills wait for their hamsters. Light bounces off the shiny floors of Silverwood hostel, escapes via the windows and gets eaten up by the silence of the darkness.

The Officer's Mess is a pale shadow of itself, rows upon rows of chairs await misshapen behinds, and plates await unintentional chipping and the hand dryers await the insertion of hands in to the slits for drying. From profound to the profane, KS, you manage the transition well.

The answer that begs the question is...

OTs of the 89th FC, Mussoorie, are hard at work, solving questions on probability and statistics, solving problems in education, health, internal security, Constitutional law, IPC, CrPC, CPC, official language, solving Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Marx, boredom, distraction, old age, Facebook privacy and other things. And a whole body of macro, micro and miniscule Economics that if when read shall ensure a Nobel prize for Economics reading.

My best wishes to the OTs.