Movie Review: The Babu who Mocked me

 

**********spoiler alert!!***********

Kata is Back!! NOT the straight-laced politically correct one but … Austin Kata! In the sequel to the surprise box office hit Austin Kata: Super Suave Officer, we meet a horde of our old favorites along with a whole new set of loonies.

The movie opens just a few weeks after where the last one left off. Having successfully neutralized the threat of her arch nemesis MP Evil by ensuring that his plans to take over the World are deadlocked by a bureaucratic gridlock, Austin goes on a vacation. If you have just come out of the jungles and have somehow missed the first movie, let me fill you in. MP Evil planned to hold the world to ransom by pointing a ‘laser’ on the moon at the Parliament house. Austin through some very smooth penmanship manages to ensure that the switch which was to trigger this into action is held up by the customs officials.

On her vacation, she is smitten by an incredibly charming guy called Manohar Bath.  When she is all set to smite him back with a few well-placed jokes and a toss of the head, she realises that she is no longer funny. She panics till she finds out that MP Evil used his henchmen Funk and Gloom to steal her Foo-Nies and till she gets back her Foo-Nies, she will not be funny.

Things complicate further when MP Evil is cleared of all the blame of being a super bad guy coz the govt. no longer has a case against him- all his case files were sold away to the raddi-waala by a low rung clerk in his pay.

Payment:

One building and two cars –MP Evil

Rs 1000- Raddiwala

When action is initiated against the clerk, he manages to wiggle out of it by promising his bosses that they could have his building as their govt. office for half the usual rent. Plus they could use his cars anytime they wanted. They settle for renting the office at three fourth the going rate and one car becoming the office car.

Austin tries to impress the new guy with some jokes she gets of the internet but fails miserably when she realized he read those fwds too! We are however saved the emotions of feeling too bad for our heroine when we find out through a lucky accident that Manohar Bath is actually Badbu Dhar Bath one more of MP Evil’s stooges sent in finish off Austin.

Horrified, Austin realises she has to go back in time to rewrite the present and get back her Foo-Nooies so that she can save the World and kick the Bath up his butt even before she meets him. She goes to her gadget guy the Administrative Officer who fits her up with a time machine coyly disguised as a seventeen year old white Sumo and a pen made to look like a gun. As the story moves forward, we realise that this is not the only cleverly concealed pen- almost all her accessories seem to morph into pens and the official stamp is not too far behind.

You will have to go on this quest with Austin till she realises that she never lost her Foo-Nies! She was always funny. Just like the first movie, catchy one liners and crazy scenes abound. And some of the catch phrases she keeps repeating are so irresistible that it has taken all my energy not to pepper my review with them: ‘So cool YA!’, ‘Have you read my blog baby?’, ‘Groovy baby!’, ‘ Do I make you laugh baby?’…

A must watch on the whole…

The Rime of the Ancient Babu

or The one where I am weird

 

Any resemblance to any individual living, dead or imaginary is purely coincidental and completely unintentional….

I know it is completely against the spirit of this blog to discuss anything serious especially if its currently relevant but I met a man who told this tale and I had to pass it on.

It is an ancient Babu

And he stoppeth me of three

‘By thy long stay’d service and crazed eye,

Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?’

“There was a Babu,” quoth he

“he was great and young,

A very star

And all around rang the cry…

 

Twinkle twinkle little star

How I wanna be what you are,

Up above the world so high

Like a diamond in the sky”

************

He held me with his glittering eye

And quoth,“But it’d not last…

 

There were crooked men and they walked a crooked line,

They found our straight hero open to crookedness.

They brought a crooked bag, he loved the crookedness.

And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”

**************

The ancient Babu, he beat his breast,

And thus spake on, that ancient man.

“The men, they changed

And he brought misery to all.

Poor or rich, he wanted their all…

 

Ding dong bell

Pussy’s in the well.

Why put her in?

She paid no one in

Was she pulled out?

After greasing out.”

************

Till his very soul turned black,”

Shuddered the ancient man.

“Wealth begot wealth

And brought cops

N infamy in stealth.

 

Bad bad black sheep! Has he any gold?

Yes sir, yes sir, thirty payti’s full.

Ten from the master, ten from the dame,

Ten from little guys who live down the plains.”

***********

I started, ‘I fear you old Babu,

I fear thy tale,

I fear thy glistening eye’’

“Fear not, young ‘un

But listen to my tale

For help, he did run…

 

Pussy cat, pussy cat where have you been?

I have been to London, to see the Queen

Pussy cat, pussy cat what did you get there?

Was silenced by a lil mouse under her thumb”

*************

“And he was struck down!

My mate, he fell…

I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech;

That moment that his face I see,

I know the man that must hear me:

To him my tale I teach.”

 

“Jack and I, went up the hill

To change the world and order.

Jack slipped up and lost his crown

I stood watching helpless”

The Gods must be sweet tooths

I have a sore throat and can’t talk much so I am going to have to keep this one short. It’s this whole awful pre-cold feeling. You know when you are feeling lousy and it feels like you are walking through ether but nobody else guesses so there is no sympathy. Add to that, going to work as if nothing is wrong with you. If nobody is going to make a fuss about it, why fall ill? But we Katas are a tough breed- we brave through. Plus I really want to tell you guys about what I have been upto for the last coupla days.

Pretty much since the time we joined, my friend B has talked with increasing excitement about this tribal festival which happens biennially in his district. He spoke of the many wonders that had been and that were to be. He told us about the lakhs of people who would be there. And how man, woman and child would together immerse themselves in an alcoholic plane of spiritual existence for the four day period.  He spoke of blood drenched fields and drug laden priests. He spoke of govt. licensed booze shops mushrooming all over.

And mine ears stood up on mine dazed head.

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How wonderful mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

Here was I searching for meaning beyond reality and making do with reality beyond meaning. And here were these sons of the soil willingly letting go to immerse themselves in the collective primitive soul to glimpse at life at its most intense.

As we drove up to the place, I was buzzing with same energy as I’d buzzed with at the start of much awaited vacations and at the dawn of much prepped for college fests. But dreariness had marked me as her own and was waiting just around the corner.

Sure there were a lot of people but these were no mythical children of life and laughter, they were just people. Like the kind I saw on a daily basis. And the blood covered alcohol drenched primitive soul was just a lot of people really keen on their meat and booze getting a free rein in a slaughter house.

After I had time to scrape my excitement off the (non-blood drenched) floor, I noticed there were a lot of cool things going on. B now spoke of the thousands of barbers who had descended on the place and the struggle to license them all [In fact when he spoke of the efforts to push these guys away from the water sources, I took my aggressive pro-people stand and waxed eloquent on the right of people to get their hair shampooed if they wanted to. The barbers, I was assured, were there to shave heads and the Babus didn’t want the hair clogging the drains].Of the insufficient number of govt. toilets installed and the private players who thought charging tribals thirty five bucks per loo visit was a valid business proposition.  Of the kilometres of pipelines laid and the helipad built. Of the efforts in place to dissuade our naxal brothers and Telangana cousins from stealing limelight from the Gods.

Speaking of the Gods, you’ve got to hear this. Like everywhere else, the human-God interaction is on the lines of the explorer-native one: we’ll give you two strings of beads and this shiny mirror thingy and you give us Africa. Convinced that the native goddesses are incorrigible sweet tooths, the favourite local bribe is jaggery and coconuts. Now the idea here is that these goodies have to be placed inside a designated perimeter so that the Gods can access them with ease. If they are not placed inside the circle, it is assumed that your wishes will not be granted. This is a simple task when there are, say, 30, 40 or even 100 people. But what happens when there are lakhs of people keen on ensuring that their prayers are heard? Gifts become airborne and the air is thick with bio hazards and weapons of significant destruction. Forgot to tell you, these are not dainty little pieces of jaggery – they are giant mounds weighing anything from a kg to five. I am serious! Govt guys walk around in helmets and doctors are at hand to treat minor concussions and head injuries.

Having braved the consequences of prayer, these guys go back to their camp, drink a bit, grab a bite, shop a while and come back to seek audience once again.

Fun.

Governance at the speed of light

Once upon a time in a land not so fr away one of my friends fell fr a girl. And he fell hard. So he decided to take an aggressive approach. He would leave a message for her on facebook and then mail her asking if she saw the message and then text her to tell her that he mailed her. Although usually counterproductive in this context, this is the kind of aggression I like to see in people when they want to get something(Btw he ended up getting the girl. But then all strategies work if the girl already likes you and if she doesn’t, even building the Taj for her would be nothing but a tasteless display of wealth). Why waste time getting the message across? You guys with your mail trails, power ccing and instructions for ‘eod’ know all about it. But Babuland is yet to hear of it.

Having got the wrong end of the whole hare and tortoise saga, the universal query is ‘why do it fast when it can be done slower?’ After tracking the communication revolution till fax machines, the establishment felt it had arrived and gave up. The bulk of the government rests uneasily on a network of fax machines, snail mail, messenger boys and Tappal clerks. Mail for reasons yet to be revealed to me is called tappal in my side of the world and they have designated clerks to sort the mail daily and fwd it. In fact if these guys chose they could rewrite policies and bring down governments.

Did you hear of the clerk who went rogue, locked up three months’ wage sheets of MGNREGS workers and went on a holiday. He was a cracks-locks-and-leaves kinda guy. They broke open the cupboard and found the stuff after a minor rebellion by unpaid tribals threatened a breakdown of the govt machinery and alarmed the govt. into posting an enthu IAS guy as the new boss there.

He is not the only guy who is breaking down communications barriers. I am hearing great stuff about the officer who transformed communication in his office. An enterprising guy, he noticed that everyone had a computer on his desk. So he got a good Wi Fi connection in place and gmail accounts for all. He formed an online group and had a two day training workshop. And you know, the whole thing was really transformatory. People are so impressed by the amount of time he is saving and cant stop raving about the collateral benefits of making the organization flatter. The only downside is that they have only two printers. So you sometimes end up waiting a long long time to get the mails printed so that they can be put on file and forwarded to all the officers to be signed.

A guy just cant seem to catch a break here!

Of course when it comes to some things govt. communication is faster and more resilient than one of those ‘if you fwd this, three of your secret wishes, two of your facebook wishes and four of your mom’s wishes will come true. And if you don’t, you will be turned into a cheerful lizard before you can press sign out’ mails. Take the story of the Collector and the Bhajji. When he joined service as a sub collector, he met a Bhajji he liked at a party. One of the attenders at the party heard him exclaim in his naïve enthusiasm ‘hey this stuff is not too bad’. And his fate was sealed. Attender told attender and word spread. Party after party, year after year everywhere the officer went, the bhajiya was sure to go. His postings changed and he moved districts but the spectre of the bhajji rose at every organized event like clockwork. Hamlet would have had an easier time getting rid of the ghost than this poor man. I met him recently seven years after the fateful party. A broken embittered man, he taught me the importance of making your poker face your only face and confided in me of his plans to start a support group for people persecuted by fried food.

Lighting my match stick of hope, I’d like say that things are slowly changing. Sms as an official communications line is all pervasive in AP govt now and the training Academy at Mussorie is an inch away from becoming paper free thanks to software called e-office designed exclusively for the government. It’s the last but one straw for the anti change Academy employee but the popping of the cork for the Indian govt..

Let the fizzy communications flow!

The Long Dark Twilight of the Soul

People seem to be finding it almost impossible to keep their shoes to themselves these days. You cant seem to turn a corner without seeing someone lobbing their shoe at some celebrity. I don’t get it- if I had to throw some part of my outfit at strangers, my shoe would be the last thing I’d choose. Imagine hopping back home on four inched stilettos. In fact I don’t think I would throw any part of my outfit at people I really do love everything I wear. Maybe that’s the solution? Give all activists beautiful shoes and save leaders some embarrassment?

On the whole I get these guys’ craving for an audience and their search for some kind of validation of their lives. I am like that too. Take me with my blog. Thanks to it and a fairly large set of very polite and encouraging friends: I have successfully deluded myself into thinking that my life is interesting.  Let the internet go for three days and mundane reality hits back with a vengeance. And I find myself in exactly the same place I was in before the PDW (Public Display of Writing).

This is essentially my new format of attention seeking. Seeing that I am not going to be doing or wearing anything glamorous (or at least good enough for facebook) for the next few billion years, I realised I could get my daily kicks with my writing. Anyway there is endless material here.

All babus are raconteurs. And why shouldn’t they be? They have great stories and nobody they have told them to, so far. Catch any five Babus and they usually have enough material to write seven bestsellers between them but the law of the Babus declares that ‘he who is most senior shall be heard’. And many a tale remains untold. I decided to side step my wait in the story telling ladder courtesy the blog. Howzzat Su-..Sirs?

To understand this story telling urge, you need to feel the loneliness that is a Babu’s life for the first god-knows-how-many-years-but-it-feels-like-an-eternity part of his life. Territorial animals like the tigers; we keep a safe distance from each other, which means that there might be people below you and people around you but never any people you can be with.  Now, I don’t know what your average tiger does once he is off duty. Doing his nails and counting his stripes are the funnest things I can think of, off-hand but your poor heartland Babu really has nothing to do once his work is done. What can you do in a one cell phone tower town? If you are weak, extended exposure to small towns can be deadly. Whims inbreed and become eccentricities and self-worth inflates into delusional self. You end up having a whole

Fee, fie, fo, fum

All hail the king

Of all he sees

scenario playing in your head. And the loneliness continues and you are just accompanied by deserts of vast eternity.

First I moved to Bangalore,

And I couldn’t stop praising Bombay.

Then I lived for a while in Bangalore,

But I couldn’t stop paining all about Bbay.

Then I moved to Hyderabad

Now Bangalore bores everyone I meet

I will move out of Hyderabad soon

and silence’ll reign coz there’ll be none to crib to.

Aham Brahma

In the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king. At least in the beginning. Peep in three years later and he is God. Power undoubtedly changes people but what changes them even more is unabashed display of power. You might be dealing with millions of dollars but as long as you can’t see the glory of all that money, you might as well be dealing with indices, interest rates or sales targets. All numbers. And hence with a flimsy hold on reality. Convert those numbers into the number of people you can clothe, feed or employ and then sit back and watch the human drama as a million more people approach you for the same benefits, the original million look up to you to solve other problems and your own employees start getting ideas. Then you begin to understand power.

And if you let this power actually get to you, life suddenly transforms into a game of chess with snakes on ladders.

Sounds like fun you say, but it’s something I’d rather pass. It would take too much time away from my favourite activity- sitting in a corner and moping about how life is meaningless. In spite of reading a million articles about the value of change and picturing myself in another million movie-like situations where I am an agent of change, I am largely anti change where my personal life is concerned. After all, you cant improve on perfection. I would ideally like to get out of the service exactly as I entered it.

If I have a choice!

Because being a Babu is all about playing the Power game. Who’s below you? Who’s above you? How do you get the guy who’s below you but not under you to work the way you want?  What about the guy who is beside you and also slightly below you? What’s his angle? Everyone is playing this all the time and it helps in a way. Implicit belief in the power of hierarchies is one of the key motivating factors at work. How else do you get a permanent employee with guaranteed pension on a time bound promotion path to actually do what you want him to do? Or even what he is supposed to do?

And naturally you cant keep playing hopscotch for ten hours a day, six days a week without slowly questioning the logic of walking on two legs all the time. Like the other day when as part of a drive to make my mandal child labour free, I went to this house where a local Cinderella was being kept at home as a free slave by her father and step mom. Still a novice at the game, I didn’t realise that you might be the Queen herself but unless that guy knows you are the Queen, you are just a crazy lady with a funny head gear.

Either that or people don’t find the guys from the edu department scary. Coz I had those in bucket loads with me. They had roped in the the big gun (me) because this guy had dug in his heels and refused to budge every time people tried talking him to sense. So we entered the compound and started talking to the guy.  Naturally a chair was produced for madam and I draped myself a la the Big B in Sarkar. You could see from his responses that this guy had a hide six inches thick and was not going to budge. So I started telling him in my scary voice how it is illegal and how he could get arrested for this. And our Gabbar Singh says, ‘even I know the police, l can call them too’.

Stately exit by Kata while the others pounce on him and try to explain ‘how dare he?’ to him. I get into the car and call in the Marines telling them its time to land. You see, once you are a Babu with a big B, you have lost the right to get into a fight. And more so the right to get beaten up. It is a fundamental right undoubtedly but one the Big Bs cant afford. My troops in the meanwhile had managed to clarify to the man the magnitude of his error and he pretend-apologetically came to my car and says he would get the girl to the hostel tomorrow. By now I am no longer just Kata I am the Babu in his entirety. So I go, ‘I am not leaving this village without this girl. I am going to take the girl and then I am going to take you and put you in prison. After that I will see what I can do about your ration card and then your land. Who do you think you are talking to… you…’

Having showcased the Vishwaroop, my troops and I made a stately retreat to the local school and five minutes later the cops arrived. So I sat (less Sarkar, more Kata) and waited while the minions and the cops went to fetch the girl. The whole operation was over in fifteen minutes.

The gratifying thing was that the girl although a little scared, really wanted to go to school. Can you believe, the bastards were having a wedding related function in their house but had sent the lil girl to work in their field? So we scooped in the girl and one of her super apologetic female relatives drove straight to a very well run Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya and enrolled her in.

I remember six months ago having a conversation with my Dad about how this job would change me. I insisted that it was just a job and wouldn’t affect me.

Six years later: exit Kata. Enter Mephistopheles. Mwahahahahaha

I mean…tehehehehe.

The car that Kata drove

You know I really want to do a good job with this whole training thing. There are a lot of interesting things to be done actually. But geography keeps getting in the way. I envy all you guys who can move mountains and bring global economies to their knees from the comfort of your ergonomic chair in your stylish, climate controlled offices. I have to travel an average of 150- 200 km daily going from village to village, mandal to mandal learning this here, kicking ass there. Its tough you know. Especially with my car.

My car is a macho beast who believes that suspension is for sissies and power steering for wimps. Where other cars hum, mine growls. And it’s a throaty growl- my folk living in our second storey flat can hear me come in from the street. Naturally when we go on our long long rides together on rebellious roads, we have a lot of disagreements. I fear for my back and neck and he thinks the louder he rattles the better host he is being. In the first few weeks I could barely move my upper body by the end of the day. Now I have got used to it but I have this perpetual craving for a neck massage.

When I drive the car, the conversation goes to a whole different pitch. To turn the wheels by a ten degree angle, the steering wheel has to whirl around thirty times, stand on its head and hope for the best. Of course I am getting beautifully tones arms out of this. So, ‘yay’ I guess.

When I joined, they gave me another car an Ambassador-the Babu Car. But she was a nervous creature. Every time there was a long pause at a busy signal and it was hot, she would get all worked up and just stop. Absolutely refused to budge! After this happened to me four times in one hour, I decided I needed another car. A few days later, I met my car.

In a year, my car will be old enough to vote. I don’t know if it’s the age which has made him wiser but in general he is a retiring sort of guy for a govt. car. No wailing of sirens or flashing of lights for him. Probably because we live in the capital. I am told that a lot of Babus have this razzle dazzle surrounding every single drive they go on. Let’s go get some dinner. Turn on the sirens! Coffee anyone?  Get the blue light going.

I am yet to see all of this but I have been assured it happens. I don’t get the Babu’s need for a siren in a normal day-to-day life– its not like a land record which has been gently nudged into entangling itself suddenly needs to be corrected. When I find myself in a place where sirens are de rigueur, I will give my car a makeover and get ‘traffic is for suckers’ written on it. It’s better than living with the constant noise and serves the same purpose.

Sometimes I think the car should call it a day. But he absolutely refuses. Retirement for cars is called condemning in the Government. I tried telling the folks back at office that I condemn my car on a daily basis. Apparently that is not enough- you need a vehicle inspector to give it a through look through before condemning it. But I don’t see why a thorough look through is necessary. A bat with a sore throat could say that the car is a workaholic senior citizen.  Everyone already knows this, but they are going to make him work as long as he can.

As an eighteenth birthday gift, I am planning to surprise my car with some suspension thingies next week.

Hope he doesn’t get too rattled about it.

The Goose that searched for the boiled egg

 

When my parents realised that my sister and I had grown out, they were disappointed. They wanted more of us. So they reacted the same way as they do to any issue: went and bought a book on it. Titled “How to increase you height” this book was a complete guide guaranteed to increase your height by at least two inches, replete with success stories and fifteen minute exercise routines using domestic objects. Neither of us ever did these exercises or grew. And yet, till we graduated we were never too far from a copy: Manasa had one, I had one and there was one at home so we could revise during the semester breaks. And these books seemed to breed every time they met. Through the years they kept popping up at the least likely places – I even found a copy a month ago when I was trying to clear out some old books.

Naturally I kept it.

This book is like the symbol of perseverance or atleast hope against the odds of life. We all have those symbols: the diya we light for Diwali, the call for Namaaz, the star of David; or more mundanely: the annually renewed gym membership, the ‘will yu b my fraandzz’ pick up line, my insane heels irrespective of terrain. Since I came to Babuland, I have a brand new one.

The Egg.

The Government of AP requires that school children be fed two eggs weekly as part of the Mid Meal Scheme and an egg daily at Government hostels. Logically, this means that if you visit only schools daily, you will get to see atleast two sets of egg appended meals in a week. I have been visiting different government schools reasonably regularly since November and except on well-orchestrated visits when your arrival is expected, the egg remains elusive. These children eat eggs yesterday and eggs tomorrow but never today.

Why the egg fixation?

Mid Day Meal food like hostel food and all other food cooked on a large scale regularly, magically transforms into the same yellow coloured thing irrespective of how varied and nutritious the menu might have been designed to be. So the policy makers figured, you can’t make a healthy child without breaking an egg. And hence they introduced the egg (way before the chicken, I might point out). But the knights might have had better sighting reports of the Holy Grail than me with the boiled eggs.

Makes me think, maybe I should not try to count the eggs before the kids are fed.

But you see, its our job as Babus to make sure that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men are actually doing what they were told to do: make sure that the egg falls in the child’s lap. But the horses seem to buck and some of the king’s men seem reluctant. There are obviously a lot of people who do their job well for the sake of it and for the love of children. But there are others who are such hard boiled eggs that they would steal from little kids.

Enter Kata.

[And actually, all the other (many) working members of the govt..]

This is all I do- chase people. Creative policy making and Yes Minister-like clever political manoeuvres will probably come later on but as of now all I do is chase people. The UPSC seems to have got its mandate mixed up. They were looking for sheepdogs but ended up recruiting lions. Sure we make everyone fall into place with a flick of the finger. Of course, a lot of work gets done with us barely putting an effort. But at the end of the day we are just sheepdogs. Like Marvin the paranoid android, you cant help moaning on the blue days, ‘brain the size of a planet and they make me play hunt-the-egg’. So while you guys are doing all these cool things like chasing markets and indices we Babus chase sheep.

And of course eggs.

Egg-on soldier! Should catch ‘em before they egg it.

Entouraged

In the world of the movers and shakers, there are two extremes. At one end is of course the Babu and at the other end is the Don in Don 2. A hardworking man, the Don believes staunchly in the saying ’if it were done well, it were done by you’. Everything from bullying the opposition, jumping off buildings, fighting the baddies to flirting with molls and cops has to be done by the poor guy single handedly. Where is the vast empire one is supposed to command over as a Don? Where are the thousands eagerly looking forward to kiss your hand?

He should take lessons from our Babu.  A true babu never goes alone anywhere. Like the average king who derives his power from his sceptre, crown and throne; the babu exists because of the presence of one camp clerk or cc (an uncool name for a PA), one attender (or peon) and one driver. Obviously once you have reached a certain point in your career, there are one or more gunmen to contend with too. God save u if u serve in a Naxal district and manage to invoke the ire of the citizen warriors. You will find yourself quickly categorised under some grade security threat and you will then be plagued with guards till the sweet release of death.

Our Naxal brothers apparently are very accommodating in their death threats. Someone told me that they bring out an annual wish list of the people they hope to kill that year on the lines of the Forbes lists. The police presumably refer to this list when they decide what category security to give you (I would like to state that as I am not privy to the workings of any of these magnificent organizations this is mere speculation).

My aversion to security guards and gunmen might seem bizarre but I resent being watched and followed around all the time. Others around me have wanted power, money, love and recognition but all I ever wanted is to be just left alone. And I have been stymied at every step of the way. After years of rebellion and hardwork, I thought I had finally managed to get my parents off my back about doing anything I want and going anywhere I want, and now the government of India decides I need minders 24/7.

My training is structured in such a way that most of my days are spent away from the Collectorate. Ignoring gentle instructions from all sides, I generally set forth on my adventures with just my driver. But whichever office I go to, I am quickly assigned an attender because God forbid Madam ever has to carry her pen. One guy was so duty-minded that he would interrupt my enthusiastic interactions with the local populace with ‘Madam, hand over the pen you are carrying’. In the Collectorate, my attender feels the need to run ahead of me and shoo the people off my path with a boisterous ‘Oi’ here and a sharp ‘Hey’ there.

When cars were first introduced in the 18^th century, it was mandatory for every car to have a person running ahead of it to warn bystanders (innocent or otherwise) of potential doom. I guess the Babus took inspiration from there.

Now that I have been in the system for a while, I realise the significance of having these people around you. They are like the accessories of the King- without them you are just a female who looks out of place. But with them you are a three-headed, ten armed trainee collector with powers to wreak havoc on everyone you see.

Or at least, so they think.

More on that later. In the meanwhile, I continue Don-like to run from roof to roof all alone. But I fool myself. Close on my heels are my CC, attender and liaison officer panting, arms outstretched and tripping over each other. I just hope they don’t fall off a building in their excitement.

The shrimp who would be King

I jog in this park near my house in the evenings where the usual gangs gather at that time: mommies with kiddies; the walkers and joggers; and the cuddling love birds. The cuddlers are a dignified and retiring bunch who gather in twos and shun public gaze by closeting themselves in the shadows. Some days it feels like no shadow is safe. They are everywhere. So today evening after tripping on two or three couples accidentally, I noticed how it is always the girl who has to contort herself into all sorts of shapes and angles in order to settle into a mutually comfortable position. Think about it- when was the last time you saw a guy leaning on a girl’s shoulder. Or a guy clutching a girl in the throes of some private emotion while the girl looks on bravely into the horizon.

And I got thinking about how this relationship dynamic is so like every single professional relationship the small Babu has with the rest of the world. In the world of Babus, there are big Babus and there are small Babus. Though it’s not clearly demarcated, the difference between the big ones and the small ones is that, when they want to, the big ones can usually do their own thing while telling the world to stuff it while the small ones are subject to the whims of the teeming multitude. True, the Matrix taught us that we always have a choice. So I guess in a way the Babus choose their size.

When you decide to bat for the small side, you have to go through a quick training program in acrobatics, juggling and mental contortion-ing before the world pounces on you. By the time you meet them, these guys are experts at juggling the expectations of their bosses, the local media, political influences, their egos and the family’s economic status. This guy has so many people in his bed that he can rarely get through the day without bending over backwards twice and twisting himself into a jalebi at least once daily. Make no mistake when I use the word small- even a peon in a government office is a minor lord in his own right. There will always be people who will treat him the way they treat God: with obsequiousness, expectation and gifts in cash and kind. And it is for this power that the Small Babu will twist and turn, morph and spin.

Assuming this guy really does have a choice, I am amazed that he chooses to be a petty king over being a respectable every-man.

And this makes me ask, if you had a choice: would you be a small king or a denizen of a metropolis. Being a small king of course has its benefits. Do three good deeds and threaten four evil townsfolk and you have the local gang rooting for you. And you kinda own everything in your kingdom. But after that, what?  Have you seen the size of some of those forts? They are so damn small! If it were me, I’d get the hell out of there. In fact, I think most wars in history can be explained by kings who were looking to just get the hell out of wherever they were.

Imagine the king coming back home after a busy day of work. He has nothing to look forward to but the court jester and his same old boring set of jokes, the queen cribbing about how the schools in the capital are not so great, queen number two whining about how they had better shopping in her father’s capital and the newly acquired mistress complaining about how all his gifts are from the same store. Till one day he figures –all he wants to do is live in Delhi. The kings in those days were very target driven souls, it was only a matter of moments to jump from ‘I want to live in Delhi’ to ‘let’s go conquer Delhi’. And the ball got rolling.

Seriously, they were all like that. I bet the Mongols attacked Delhi annually as part of their summer vacation cum shopping plan. It must get really dull in the deserts.

Anyway for now, I am in a city. So no plans of world dominance as yet. In the meanwhile, I have decided to start a campaign in my park. I am going to be distributing t-shirts to girls with this picture on them.