A diary from the wall of Raghunandan TR, former Joint Secretary at Govt of India.
My silence on social media was because of two reasons. First, I was fiendishly busy, catching up with fresh work and scrambling to catch up on breached deadlines. The elections put me back by a couple of months. This state of affairs is not going to improve for some time.
Second, I was very depressed.
Now, that pretty normal; one cannot be happy all the time. But this bout of gloom rested on my shoulders like a heavy weight for weeks on end. It wasn’t normal. Which meant that not only was I depressed, but I was also depressed about being depressed.
I confessed to a friend and he had a ready answer. ‘Its male menopause, take hormone injections’, he advised. ‘Have you?’ I asked him suspiciously. He is four years younger than I. He had not. He was just being a feku, in the fashion of the day.
So instead of facing the prospect of growing breasts or needing to shave twice a day, I sat down and thought of what makes me depressed.
I have five big worries. That’s it.
First, I worry about the politics of India. We have on the one hand, a sinister divisive force in Modi and the BJP, backed by a powerful and united body of obscurantists, bigots and moneyed people. Our institutions are being destroyed, their objectivity diminished at a frightening pace. And strident propaganda continues to build the myth of the invincibility of this cabal. On the other hand, we have a divided, fractious gaggle of parties that are gearing up to meet the challenge of the saffron juggernaut, with resources far more limited. With all their faults, this latter team is still streets ahead of the BJP; at least they won’t interfere with my fundamental freedoms. Their leaders are far more benign. But they are grievously corrupt and don’t seem ready to change that. The party that I support is fighting with its back to the wall, and our losses in recent elections are very worrisome. As we grapple with strategies for the future, we are faced with hobsons choices; whether to go it alone, or to enter into strategic alliances, which might destroy the very foundation of why this party was formed in the first place.
Second, I worry about the environment of India. We are destroying our country, polluting its soil, its waters and harming ourselves, at a pace that seems irreversible. The awful killings of ordinary people in Thoothukudi, seeking a decent, clean life, just to protect a polluting industry that violated every single safety norm, is just the tip of the iceberg. Our forests are being cut down and cleaved by highways, in the pursuit of mindless vikas. We are damming rivers, submerging rain forests, not to generate hydroelectricity, but to take water over the Western Ghats to feed our drier areas. God knows what the effect on the Mangalore coast will be, when the Yettinahole waters won’t flow into the Arabian sea. And its not as if the water is going to be used well in the drier plans. Desperate elephants are now moving from their forests, to stalk the streets of towns. Leopards hide in school bathrooms, in cities. But do we care? No. We are breeding at top speed. UP and Bihar together comprises the fourth largest country in the world. In another 20 years it will overtake the United States and jump to third place. We still want four children each, mostly male. And we speak of cleanliness, but litter and dirty our surroundings just like before. Someone else will pick up our rubbish.
Third, I worry about the economics of India. This whole liberalization thing did unlock a lot of entrepreneurial potential. But without safeguards to ensure a level playing field, we have created a hugely unequal society. Two percent of people own fifty percent of India’s wealth. One half of India owns 1 percent of India’s wealth. Behind our glitzy IT parts, malls and our antiseptic be-fogged gated communities, are crowded slums where people live in abysmal filth. Our farmers die, agitate silently and our media publishes photos of an actress’s dress style. The problem with capitalism without safeguards is that everything can be bought for a price. Including the narrative. So the voices that ought to tell us that things are going seriously wrong, are telling us that everything is fine. Its like bringing two electrodes into close proximity, with a voltage difference of a million volts. A spark is inevitable; an explosion imminent. People are likely to hit out violently.
Fourth, I worry about the futility of my own professional efforts. As a professional in decentralized public governance and anti-corruption, things are worse off than when I started on these lines of work. Nearly every government has backtracked on democratic decentralization. I thought this Union Government might actually walk the talk on cooperative federalism, but the model now is of the PM interacting directly with DMs in districts. Panchayats and Municipalities can do anything they want, on paper. In reality, everything is controlled from the top. Every effort to match the functions devolved to local governments with adequate finances has been a cropper. Most of my advice has either been differentially implemented, or straightaway fed into a shredder. One could walk away without a care, particularly when one has received ones’ professional fees. But if one wants to make a difference to the world, then the prognosis is grim.
As for anti corruption work, don’t even tell me about it. Nobody wants any work on anti-corruption. Most of the little work I do is done abroad. I’m a hundred percent EOU when it comes to this line of practice.
Fifth, I worry about my unfinished personal projects. Working with my hands is my only solace. There are no dependencies when one makes a model, paints or sketches, fixes a car, or restores a window. But there is no time. So the house is full of broken clocks, radios, cars and furniture. We live in a godown. Aditi puts up with all this stoically, but loses her temper sometime. Well into June, I haven’t completed a single one of the twenty projects I vowed I would finish this year. And hand eye coordination will disappear soon, hormone injections or otherwise.
My most depressing post yet.
Original post can be read here on Facebook. Read more from Raghunandan TR Diary
