The Mammaries of the Welfare State (45 page)

Since Dr Chakki’d been visiting Rajani Suroor every morning for the last three weeks, he’d become a familiar face at the hospital. Some of the occupants of the other beds in the ward smiled at him as he passed by. The good entomologist had a doctorly word for each one of them. ‘ . . . So, Mr Chidambaram, still feeling nervous? . . . Don’t worry,
a piles operation is nothing . . .’ Another handshake at the next bed, ‘ . . . Well, Raichur, my dear host, the gastero any better? . . . D’you think it’s God’s way of admonishing you for snacking in the wee hours while officially on a hunger strike? . . . Come come, you’ll be out soon, well in time to douse yourself with kerosene and light up at the next auspicious hour and date . . .’ Dr Chakki then paused at the foot of Bed One and modulated his voice to sound less pleased with himself and more solicitous of his interlocutor, a blind woman, with a patch over her right eye to boot, who’d been admitted for a dengue fever that simply refused to go away.

Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha watched Dr Chakki depart with unalloyed joy. Keeping vigil at a bedside was much more fun without his watchful eye on them. On their own tape recorder, they could play for the patient one of Dr Chakki’s recorded cassettes and then settle down to concentrating properly on playing their own game of Antaakshari without being distracted all the time by his bad vibes tingling their skins. Of course, Miss Shruti, who was more sensitive, claimed, particularly when she was losing an Antaakshari session, that his bad vibes emanated from his recorded voice too, though—naturally, she acknowledged—not with the same intensity. They’d pointed out to each other countless times, helplessly trembling with mirth at their own wit, that both Dr Chakki’s voice and his choices of subject matter were so soporific that a combination of the two would never ever work like an alarm clock, and that Rajani Suroor had surfaced out of coma once, but the bad vibes from the tape recorder had immediately knocked him out again.

It ought to be explained that Antaakshari which, transliterated, means ‘Of the last letter’, is a game generally played with film songs. One participant sings the first complete stanza of one song, or even just the first couple of lines, provided that they are long enough to convince his auditors
that he knows the tune and the lyrics reasonably well. The last letter of the word on which he ends must form the first letter of the first word of the song that the second participant must respond with, usually within a tense twenty seconds. When earnestly played, Antaakshari has been known to be as harrowing as poker in a Western. Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha, whose knowledge of Hindi film songs is truly encyclopaedic, play with professional single-mindedness, completely blind and deaf to the outside world. Their ne’er- say-die sessions last for hours (no song can be repeated in the same sitting), usually till their next rendezvous with Dr Chakki. Naturally, since they don’t wish their surroundings to either interrupt or eavesdrop, they sing only for each other, intensely and softly; correspondingly, one listens to the other with the cocked ears and alert face of a dog sensing a rat.

Thus, there was no way in which they could’ve either heard Rajani Suroor groan or seen his eyelids flicker. Moreover, he groaned mutedly, respectably, not like a starlet achieving orgasm in a blue film. One must also remember that the ladies sat outside his cubicle, both out of modesty and because neither much liked either air-conditioning or Dr Chakki’s cassettes, one of which was playing at that time beside Suroor’s pillow. Alas, one will never know whether this was the first time that Suroor had shown any signs of revival or whether he’d stirred and moaned before, but sadly, each time when there wasn’t anybody in the cubicle.

Dr Chakki was due back from the Madna International Hotel at two. He’d spend another hour with Suroor and play him one more cassette before tea. He’d recorded all the tapes himself in one of Rani Chandra’s studios, complete with different kinds of mindless background music at the beginning, at points of emphasis and changes of topic and as flourishes at the end. Fifteen tapes in all, and that was just the first phase, for he had much to say on the subject of the rebirth of the Welfare State. Unfortunately, since nobody conscious
had wanted to listen, he’d been constrained to seek out another type of audience.

The way to Suroor, long and tortuous, had begun with Shri Agastya Sen one rainy evening at the Prajapati Aflatoon Transit Hostel, over spicy samosas and tea. ‘He has the right cv for a messiah; he’s perfect for a figurehead. He knows the people, he can act, he’s performed before them on the streets, he’s famous, his resting-place’s become a shrine. When he wakes up, it’ll be as though Rip Van Winkle’d decided to contest for Parliament. Moreover, Suroor was—is—was—a sort of civil servant, a skilled survivor, he knows—knew—the ins and outs of the nuts and bolts. I think of him as a dormant dragon who needs to be roused into breathing some fire into his fellow countrymen.

‘I want to urge him to wake up through sound. Audiotherapy has been greatly ignored in our country. Think of him as a schoolboy determined not to get up on Monday morning no matter what tricks his mother tries. We’ve nothing to lose, you know, except Suroor. Your Dharam Chand agreed with me. God is yet to take a decision on Suroor Saab’s file, but we may issue Him a first reminder, he declared after consulting the stars.

‘It’s wonderful, Sen da, how you’ve kept in touch with the influential and powerful. So that’s the route that I’d be grateful if you could take for me. Mr Dastidar to Dharam Chand to Rani Chandra to Jayati Aflatoon. Our demands are quite simple. One: No fee. The work is its own reward. Two: My team and I’ve to be set up in Madna for the treatment, the duration of which I haven’t decided on yet. Three: I’m to be placed in charge of Suroor’s revival. I don’t want any myopic Civil Surgeon breathing dust down my neck.

‘I’ve brought with me photocopies of one of those scripts that later, I’d like to record on tape and eventually propose
to Suroor to take up as themes in his street plays. You could present these pages as convincing arguments to both Rani Chandra and Jayati Aflatoon—and in fact to anybody else who you know might want to join us but’d first like to learn what we’re up to.’

I
s
it coincidence
(ran Dr Chakki’s script)
that in Hindi our official language, Plato the Greek political theorist is called Aflatoon? Three centuries ago, when a migrant family from the North-West settled down at Aflatoonabad, dropped its caste name and picked up another
—
something less indicative of its social roots and region of origin
—
it chose Aflatoon. Was that foresight or irony? Or modesty, in that it might’ve been referring to the incredibly sweet, cloyingly heavy, mildly sickening and slightly lumpen candy of sorts, after which the town of its
—
the family’s
—
choice is named and for which it
—
the town
—
is justly renowned? Succeeding generations of the family
—
the leaders, thinkers, statesmen, founding fathers and polo players amongst them
—
have often pontificated on the nature of politics and of the Welfare State, complimented one another on their acuity and wisdom and often recalled in comparison not the candy, but their Greek namesake. He seems a good point, therefore, at which to begin.

In
The Republic,
Plato’s Socrates states that Asclepius, the son of Apollo and the patron of doctors, believed that ‘no treatment should be given to the man who cannot survive the routine of his ordinary job, and who is therefore of no use either to himself or to society’. Plato-Socrates approves entirely of the idea and himself declares a bit later, ‘This then is the kind of medical and judicial provision for which you will legislate in your state. It will provide treatment for those of your citizens whose physical and psychological constitution is good; as for the others, it will leave the unhealthy to
die, and those whose psychological constitution is incurably corrupt it will put to death.’ In the perfect state, in brief, imperfection has no place, naturally.

Yes but, I mean, really, I say
. . .
protests Rajamani Aflatoon, the first founding father of our Welfare State, in the twenty-three volumes of his
Complete Works
that’ve been published so far, and elaborates in his letter to Gajapati from a Swiss sanatorium in 1951, to be found on
Wake-Up Call
of Volume Fourteen:
Our blemished Welfare State exists, therefore, for all the millions of the imperfect who’ll never qualify as citizens of the ideal republic. Like people, like government. The quality of the second can only reflect that of the first. After all, its representatives and administrators are drawn from, and rise out of, them, the different sections of the masses. In fact, to make Plato’s monumental meritocracy work, it seems to me that his wise men must first improve the basic stock from which they choose their candidates. In other words, even the perfect state could do with a dose or two of the principles of welfare.

Just as our poor government would fare much better, without a doubt, were we able to put into effect some of the ideas of the first and
—
I’m sure that our first family will forgive me
—
the original
—
Aflatoon. His proposal for the creation of an aristocracy of administrative talent, for example, which is what his rulers become after some decades of training. Well, can we juxtapose against them, even for a minute, our members of the Steel Frame? After all, they too, at the end of their careers, have worked at all kinds of government jobs for thirty-five years. On-the-Job Training, absolutely, and probably more effective than Plato’s more formal, academic cultivation of body and mind.

I see at least one more point of comparison. Plato recruits his rulers from all stratums of society, but the
vast majority of them are chosen from the top two layers
—
principally because they are bred for the job. The cream of the scum, without a doubt. Does one need to underline the similarity with the distorted, top-heavy representation of classes and castes in the Steel Frame that led, almost a decade ago, to the setting up of the Kansal Commission in the hope that its recommendations would redress the balance? The fundamental difference of course is that Plato views this unequable, disproportionate reflection of the people in their administrators as essential to his grand design. The perfect
—
versus the Welfare
—
State, no doubt.

After that minute
—
for the duration of which we compared the two frames, the steel and the Platonic
—
is
over, we can turn our attention to one of the end-products of our deliberations, the civil servant who retires at the age of sixty-two. Sixty-two, by any scientific, physiological, logistical, numerological or astrological configuration, is a mystifyingly insignificant number. Its triviality, its arbitrariness, as a cut-off age is underscored by the fakeness of all our birth certificates. It would be fairly accurate to say that most of our sixty-two year olds are actually between the ages of sixty-eight and eighty. Time being illusion, doubtless. Then why retire our guardians at sixty-two when we can benefit for another couple of decades from the wisdom and administrative skills of a handful of them? Ah, but the problem is
—
you object
—
how to select that handful? How to prevent the legendary Dr Bhatnagar
—
for example
—
from worming his way into that hand after his return from the UN?

The solution, of course, is to choose your wise sixty-two-year-olds only after analysing the opinions of their subordinates. Pick only those who in all humility have for thirty years sucked below with as much solicitude and nicety as above. Remember that according to their annual confidential reports, they’d all be outstanding.
How then will you differentiate between the matchlessly-outstanding and the a-national-disgrace-but-outstanding? Simple: send questionnaires to
—
and interview
—
some of those assistants and deputies who suffered your prospective guardian over their heads in various offices. Ask them:

1) How would you define the term ‘outstanding’ in relation to the officer in question?

2) Did he get all his promotions on time simply because everyone needs to budge a bit every once in a while, responding, as it were, to a fundamental law of Physics?

3) What degree of relevance to the personage under discussion has the axiom that states that when one removes an officer from his position, one also causes his work to vanish?

4) When his children dropped in at his office to phone aunts in the US and cousins in Australia, did he buy them Pepsis from the Office Entertainment Allowance?

5) At meetings, when his boss dried him up with a look for having brought the wrong papers for discussion, did he hang his head in shame and weep silently like Tom Dooley? Or did he glance at you in such a way, just once, askance, that his boss’s ire was deflected onto you fully for the next twenty minutes? While he slumped back in his chair and smirked in witless relief at the others at the table?

6) Did he hang around in office pointlessly, way beyond closing time, only to impress?

7) How skilled was he at leaving his decisions for time—that sage, that overlord—to take care of?

8) Did he usually sit in front in the office car beside the chauffeur either because he wished to show that he believed in social equality or he was gay? Or because in an Ambassador, the front seat is a damn sight more comfortable? Or because he didn’t wish to be machine-
gunned down at the back?

9) How hard did he try to scramble into the Intelligence Bureau Endangered List? With what success?

10) Did he regularly sign differently different official papers, depending on their importance and the extent to which he understood them?

11) Did he address village gatherings of the semi-illiterate in English? With a quote or two from, say, Louis Mac Neice? Or did he speak some of our other languages with such perplexing fluency that in a matter of minutes, he’d notice the members of his audience eye one another in polite bewilderment?

12) Did he spit into the urinal while pissing?

13) Or sigh audibly and invoke a god while leaning forward, resting his head against the tiles, gazing down and playing a sort of billiards with the naphthalene balls in the bowl with his jet of urine as the cue?

And so on. The questions that one poses will depend, naturally, on the parties in question, on who is being interviewed about whom for what job. Rest assured that I don’t envisage selecting more than a couple of wise guardians per year. They’ll of course undergo a series of physical, medical and psychological tests—if a blue flag flapping in the wind suggests a woman drying her long hair on a terrace on a bright Sunday morning, and a glass of cold coffee suggests a middle-class wage-earner contemplating a crime, then what does an empty goods train hurtling through the night signify to you? Confidentially, of course. That sort of thing.

Well, you’ve selected your SAge-Man-for-All-SeASons and he’s distributed his mithai in celebration; what next? Why, he rushes off to his astrologer, of course, to tap the future. Okay, and after? After, you ask him to handle a specific project, keeping in mind the field of his expertise. No macro-level crap. Back to the grassroots. Dump on him acres of wasteland, for
example, to convert into a profitable orchid farm. Let him pick his own team, back him to the hilt, no knives in the back. Give him constitutional and extra-constitutional protection. Tell him to tackle the problem of traffic in your megalopolises. Ban cars completely downtown and wherever else the action is. Update your neolithic buses and trains, and instead of your air-conditioned, chauffeur-driven automobile that inches forward, sleekly and silently, at four kilometres an hour, use the bicycle-car, the manufacture and popularization of which will be given top priority in the new Welfare State. You know, doubtless, what I’m talking about? The cycle-car? With four sets of bicycle pedals, two in front, two at the back, that is to say, one for the driver, three for the passengers, with a steering wheel, a tooter and a set of gears in front? It’s either that or the normal, standard bicycle. My sixth sense
—
or my astrologer, if you wish
—
tells me that it
—
the cycle car
—
will become incredibly popular and will in fact totally revolutionize industry. You see, while pedalling and giving some shape to your leg muscles, you can at the same time bicker with your husband, paw an object of desire, or daydream to a Rani Chandra cassette. No exhaust fumes, traffic jams or parking nightmares because it’s half the size of every other car. The country’s petrol consumption plummets, its air improves and jet loads of multinationals bid it tearful farewell, only to return by the next flight, in new lightweight suits, with firmer handshakes and different briefcases with state-of-the-art plans for the various components of our cycle car. Rest assured that their modern technology simply won’t leave us alone.

Of course, no one, absolutely no one, will be above the law that will oblige the citizens of our cities to park their purring cars far away in some ghastly suburb and use our new trains, buses, cycle-taxis and cycle-cars to get to work. No exceptions, no insidious class
hierarchies or caste reservations. Ministers, terrorists, cops
—
all equally subject to the new regulations.

Yes the police too. I intend to devote an entire session
—
for which the script is ready
—
to the management of the police, so I won’t anticipate myself here
—
not beyond a point, anyway. It is monstrous how we, in our daily lives, continually allow to be flouted and belittled the bedrock-axioms that ensure the health of the state: namely, that the upholders of the law must never be seen to be above it, and that the hand that holds the gun shouldn’t sign the order to shoot. When you don’t rein it in, the beast goes berserk, and tramples all over your life and mine, and swaggers up to the richer farmers of the north and demands of each one of them a lakh of rupees, or else it’ll whisk away, torture and finish off their innocent, full-blooded sons and then congratulate itself the morning after for having wiped out some more dreaded terrorists.

The question that needs to be answered is: Is Operation SAMASAS beyond the reach of the tentacles of the Kansal Commission or not? That is to say, though it is true that the lowering of standards is fundamental to the idea of the accommodation of all imperfection within the Welfare State, isn’t it equally important that one mustn’t compromise in the least on quality control in certain key areas? That one must not lower one’s standards to the point where the rot might start to set in?