A Guide to Surviving the FC-Part 2

On a certain side of the thirties, the life and times of Bridget Jones may begin to resonate with your own life. And times. With appropriate gender inversions. Do not panic, though. To quote but Jane Austen, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters."

Needless to say, the good fortune that one possesses is a rank in the CSE. Upon possession, one moves in to the bureaucracy neighbourhood, hallowed precincts. Apart from control over one's privacy, one also loses the agency of free choice in marriage. But when was marriage ever left to the choice of children by Indian parents? They will remain seized of the matter, while relatives, family friends, sundry well-wishers will besiege you with offers galore.

The CSE rank list is a UPSC shortlist for brides and grooms for a tribe of parents. The CSE rank halo shines a mellow light on the heads of the rankers. It smooths over blemishes such as caste, class and creed. More often than not it does not. Caste is still the primary filter through which much of India looks at others. And what is better than endogamy to promote and nurture caste?

So, keep one's head on, especially now that one is past the eye of the needle. Life in The Service can be lonely and demanding. It is better navigated with the help of an able partner. Now there may be various criteria to decide the suitability of that partner. Should he/she be from the services? If from the service, the default preference seems to be for the All-India Services. Cadres change based on marriage. Marriages also happen based on need for cadre change. Either way, one wins some, loses some. C'est la vie and all that.

Since pointed Google search queries with search strings as "author's full name + wife" and other such combinations land on this blog, one feels bemused. Eligible lady enquirers, do not lose heart! There is hope still. Just follow due process and communication channels, approach competent authorities, swathe yourself in red tape. May be, who knows, you will be the answer to the Google query!

:P

Anyway, on with the survival guide after that convoluted matrimonial pep talk.

Sometime after you have qualified and before you receive communication from the powers that be informing you that they were directed by Honourable President of India and so on and so forth, you will receive a curious mail from a tailor and draper from Mussoorie. Apart from congratulating on your success in the CSE, the mailer proposes to drape you in a bandhgala, the last suit you will ever wear, for you are now a celebrated bureaucrat. Very well. A bandhgala is a must have, for you will be wearing it on ceremonial occasions and not wearing one earns a show cause notice, censure and assorted opprobria.You can take up the offer of the mailer or better still, get one stitched at a tailor near your place. The ladies may want to augment their saree collection. 

There is something to be said about being clothed like a bureaucrat. While a bandhgala automatically sets one apart from the crowd (except at restaurants where the waiters also wear a bandhgala, and they do at fancy places), one is well advised to be dressed in smart formals as often as possible. Clothes do make a man and women, in the services. To state but the obvious, one can not have state power draped in shabby clothes. One is no expert on fashion or chic dressing, but time spent observing the sartorial choices of senior bureaucrats over the year leads one to believe that a bureaucrat is an actor-acting in public interest, acting for the state. The costumes therefore must be appropriate, reflective of the status of the bureaucrat.

However, do not fuss over the bandhgalas and starched sarees too much. The laundry services are first rate at the Academy. So are housekeeping services. In fact, one's creature comforts are taken care of at the hostel. Can not start a day without a cup of tea? No problem, the room bearer will wake you up 45 minutes before the morning PT and serve a hot cup of tea. Feel famished post the PT? No problem, the Home Turf, the OT canteen, opens at 8 am. And there are the two dhabas near the Ganga hostel anyway. In fact, your monetary interactions with the two dhabas will be first rate lessons in micro-economics. They are attuned to the demand and supply situation and the FC, Phase 1, Phase 2 seasonality cycles so well that brokerages and stock exchanges can learn a trick or two from them. However, one could never figure out if the inflation rate they tracked was that of Zimbabwe or good old India. How else would one explain the sky rocketing prices of Maggi? The price of a plate of runny Maggi zoomed from Rs.35 at the beginning of FC to Rs. 3 zillion at the end of Phase 1, not including value additions such as lead, cheese and egg. 

Unless there is an urgent need for purchasing quilts (Mussoorie Septembers are super pleasant and there is never a need for a quilt) or other such seemingly exotic materials, hold your shopping horses and unleash them at the shops on Mall Road. Save yourself the usurious (but Economics-wise spot on) prices. The Mall Road, if not over run by plains tourists, is a nice enough place to stroll on most evenings. Provided the OTs have evenings for themselves. Which they normally would not. Because FC OTs do not own their time. They are marionettes in the hands of a clock that ticks of its own will.A hand that beats enormous seconds from the space-time continuum, deafening the OTs. They will wonder if the strings that animate them are from the String Theory and if they themselves are one-dimensional particles. They will not even get time to wonder. Time to wonder is for Alice. Whereas the OTs are just White Rabbits, forever running late, creatures of the clock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. *Evil laugh.*

Source: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcub32MKS01qlt206o4_250.png

Source: http://www.stellamuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/alice_in_wonderland___white_rabbit_by_clairestevenson-d5abdon.jpg

On a trek to Lal Tibba and blue berry cheese cake.

Here is the trek description in a more readable form.

• Trek from the academy to Lal Tibba.
• Started at 7.30 am.
• Downhill walk till Bhilaru pump house.
• Salt sprinkling ceremony to ward off leeches and to maintain pH levels, slaughtered few mountain goats to propitiate trekking gods (ok, this part is made up, the sacrifice part).
• Some more downhill walk on algae covered paths (slippery as hell).
• Bicchu buti kisses in between (painful, painful, irritating initially, but one forgets after a while as the aches in legs from climbing overtakes the bicchu buti sting). Nobody quite grasped the nettle!

  

  Beware of bicchu buti.

  
  

• 

  Some mushrooms enroute.

• Dead wood blocks the narrow path; OTs slide on their bottoms in order not to roll down 80 ft before the fall is broken by trees. Fat bottomed OTs you make the rugged world go round!
• Crossed leech infested area near a pool of stagnant water and a ribbon of a stream that has the deceptive roar of a raging torrent, somehow. Yours truly mistook the leeches for earthworms, steps in to the pool, soggy shoes and socks torment for the rest of the trek.
• Climb begins in earnest. Narrow, gravelly path. Precipitous drop one one side and stinging nettles on the other.
• Crawl on all fours at a place. Palms still sweat when one thinks of that part. Happy because of the paunch which lowered the centre of gravity.
• Climb past hamlets, barking dogs, flatulent cows.
• Climb past fruit bearing trees (apple, apricot), 'mansoor' shrubs
• Climb ends at Lal Tibba view point. Two sleepy, generic cafes. A binoculars on a roof top. Cloudy so could not see any of the upper Himalayas. Do ends justify the means? Not for Lal Tibba trek I say!
• Pleasant walk downhill and some more climb up to ITM lawns for lunch.

• 

  A bee going about its business.

• Kellogg Memorial and St.Pauls churches, old and redolent of 19th century Raj era.
• Char dukaan disappointed few motor vehicle borne pretty young things. Heard the pancakes are worth making the trek to Landour. Should check out the said pancakes.

  

  Signboards at a cafe.

• Kulri bazaar home to quaint shops. Antiques store was a shortcut to an indeterminate past, in to lives of others, memorabilia mundane and mysterious. Reminded me of the saying that love is greater than truth. And commerce in nostalgia did not seem an example of exploitative capitalism.
• Serendipitous discovery of Clock Tower Cafe by friends. Blueberry cheesecake was out of this world. The ambience made it especially noteworthy.

  

  The interiors of Clock Tower Cafe.

  
  

  

  The coffee was good.

So that in nutshell is an account of the trek. Was it tough? You bet it was. Was it memorable? Every bit yes, especially the scary bits. Was it worth all the sweat, salt, fat etc? I suppose so.

A larger collection of photographs of the trek can be found here.

Below is the trek account in its original form.

Lal Tibba earned an enemy in me today. The trek was 18 km long. The unsuspecting batch started a slow walk downhill till we reached a point where we sprinkled liberal amounts of salt on our shoes (a pointless exercise, for dry salt does not stick to dry shoe surfaces), socks and inside the shoes. This pickling of ourselves in salt was to deter potential dependents in the form of leeches. Once sufficiently salted, the batch made its way through a narrow path surrounded by an abundance of bicchu buti. A handwritten caution note pinned to a tree does not prepare one to the full scale horror of bicchu buti rubbing against one's shins and arms, even through a layer of cloth. The resultant sting was bitter, intense for the initial 2-3 minutes and the itch fades away in to the background remaining a persistent irritant for a time. There was a spot in the descent where a fallen tree caused few anxious moments as the OTs had to go around the gnarled roots on a narrow path and descend some 12 ft in an almost vertical drop, land on another narrow strip of loose dirt path of 1 ft width failing which the OT would take a tumble down an abrupt drop of around 80 ft. It was the first instance when one feels a bit of trepidation. One also imagines Final Destination 1 to 5. Then there was another point in the climb where the loose gravel and a slope of close to 60 degrees meant one had to cling to tufts of grass or shrubs and climb on all fours. It was not a dignified sight for the civil servants to crawl on the sides of the hills, but between the indignity of crawling and the reasonable certainty of a headlong plunge to the very bottom of the valley some 1500 ft below, rational human beings choose crawling.

There was this funny thing of feeling giddy the moment one raises their head to admire the vista of trees of the deepest tree-green covering folds of earth, like vertical love handles, the tremendous middle Himalayan Mussoorie range. So, to avoid falling off the mountain side, one tends to keep his head down, eyes peeled to the path, belabored breath like a sputtering engine. Keep one's head down and climb and climb and climb. Through rocky paths strewn with slate slabs, dried cow dung, an accompanying dog and a racket of dog barks. Climb till you wonder if you are ascending to heaven. Climb some more till your calf muscles turn in to mountain goat muscle. Stringy and tough.

After all the climbing one reaches Lal Tibba. The point we landed up at after the rather difficult trek was a small piece of tarred road and couple of cafes. Since it was overcast there was no chance of seeing the snow-clad Himalayas and the prominent peaks. The culmination of the trek was underwhelming to say the least. Post lunch one was free to move to the academy as per one's preference and I opted to walk down to Landour, along with few friends. Landour was pretty as a post card. Of special mention was the Clock Tower Cafe, a delightful cafe with superb views and a blue berry cheese cake to die for.

A lazy Sunday, 'Roads to Mussoorie'

'Let me have a companion of my way, were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.'- Laurence Sterne.

Today was a breathing space of sorts. A much needed one. I spent the day idly lazing around in the room and in the campus. It afforded me time to read Ruskin Bond's 'Roads to Mussoorie.' The book is available in the Gandhi Smriti Library, along with few other books by Ruskin Bond. It is a good source material for information on local history, geography, flora and fauna. Like, did you know that Rudyard Kipling stayed in the Charleville Hotel in the summer of 1888? The erstwhile Charleville Hotel is the present LBSNAA as you all know.

So, from one writer to another, hope you enjoyed your stay at the academy. Did you write anything while you were here?

The OTs occupied themselves in various ways. The culturally inclined practiced rigorously for the cultural programme scheduled tomorrow. The invite for the said event is in the form of a memo. A memo is short for memorandum. More about memo in a later post may be?

A bunch of OTs played cricket with tennis ball and few even got injured. Most others went to the Mall Road to see all that one has seen last week too. Once one starts living in a hill station as a resident and not visit it as a tourist, the perspective starts changing. There is one main street and not much else to the sleepy town. The town itself starts contracting in size, especially after one covers the surrounding areas in short but intense treks. Soon enough one starts to look at people after one has had their fill of the trees, hills, clouds, shadows, flowers and birds. Now, people are infinitely complex creatures. And writing about them is fraught with consequences. As a writer, one must write. Therefore, you may find fictitious people in my accounts here. They will never be real people, not even in approximation, but an amalgamate of various characters, various facets of very many people. Any resemblance is surely your imagination.

About the quote at the start of this post. It is best to go for walks in the hills alone. However, it is not bad to have a companion too. Provided the companion can maintain composure not to talk except to remark on the remarkable aspects of the surroundings. That is what the quote means.