By Mahmood Saberi, Special to Gulf News
Bureaucrats (or ‘babus’ as they are affectionately known as in India) have been warned to come to work on time or face action.
Immediately following the take-over by a new government in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, the chief secretary gave a time frame to all staff in various departments to meet its new priorities.
He said in a note that he expects all government officials to be in the office on time and expects them to discharge their responsibilities. Any violations of these orders will be met with extreme seriousness, he said.
He did not elaborate what the “extreme seriousness” would entail. Most probably the tardy person would be transferred to a remote corner of the state where he would be chased around his work desk by hungry baboons.
I first heard about “government service” when a senior in my school said he landed a job in a government department. “My life is set,” he said, or words to that effect, overjoyed with his new career path.
I found out that once you get a job, it is very hard for the government to fire you, even if you rarely went to work. I badly wanted to work for the government when I heard about the number of holidays you get for the various festivals.
(Incidentally, the word bureaucracy comes from the French word, bureau, a desk. So bureaucracy is basically, “government by people at desks”).
I can imagine the angst, the anxiety and disruption in thousands of households across the sprawling and densely populated state, caused by the chief secretary’s diktat.
Husband (working in the department of corrections and rehabilitation), speaking to wife: “Can you pack my lunch earlier tomorrow. I have to be in office by 9?”
Wife: “Why, did a prisoner escape? Who will drop Bintu [their daughter] at school?”
A government job is a cushy job — not only in India but in most countries across the globe — and it takes determination, luck and motivation to find your niche in the so-called public sector, where your job is to serve the public and help the government function.
My first reporter’s beat when I landed in this region was covering a certain government department in a certain Gulf country. “Go get his interview and ask him tough questions,” said my boss, shooing me out of the office and into the blazing hot outdoors.
The official was like a character in a mystery movie. He had a nameplate on his polished office door, he had a designated parking place in the shade, he had a secretary who took my many messages, but I never could meet him as he was never at work.
After a week of sitting and staring at the secretary and trying to spook him, I began to wonder whether the official was just a fictitious person set up in a dummy office for pesky journos like me.
If you are like the goverment officials having trouble getting to work on time, missing your breakfast and forgetting to say goodbye to your cat, after bingeing the whole night on Facebook or watching TV serials, all is not lost.
Efficiency experts say it takes 21 days to break a bad habit. The number comes from a very popular book from the 1960s called Psycho-Cybernetics written by Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon who found that patients took about 21 days to get used to their new faces.
But you do not have to undergo plastic surgery to get to the office on time as now there are also various apps that you can download on your smartphone to help you sleep early and get up fresh.
The state government servants better be sharp or AI (or Artificial Intelligence, not Air India) will take over their jobs, and robots learn fast, even ways to disappear from office.
