Thursday, June 17, 2010

10 Chanakya quotes for bureaucrats as finance minister unveils statue of Arthashastra’s author in Gujarat's I-T office

HERE is the caption of this picture: The Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee unveiling the statue of Chanakya, at newly built Income Tax Office, at Ambavadi in Ahmedabad on Wednesday.
As one of the master politicians of Independent India, Pranab Mukherjee, unveiled the statue of ancient India’s super diplomat with a command over economics and politics, BoI (babusofindia.com) presents 10 quotable quotes of Chanakya which some Indian bureaucrats might have heard before, even without reading his Arthashastra and Neetishastra.

1) A person should not be too honest. Just as straight trees are chopped-down first, honest people are taken advantage of first.
2) An egoist can be won over by being respected, a crazy person can be won over by allowing him to behave in an insane manner and a wise person can be won over by truth.
3) Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions - Why am I doing it? What the results might be? And Will I be successful?
4) Even if a snake is not poisonous, it should pretend to be venomous.
5) If you get to learn something even from the worst of creatures, don’t hesitate.
6) The four greatest enemies of a man are - the father who has taken a loan, the characterless mother, the beautiful but promiscuous wife and the stupid child.
7) The world’s biggest power is the youth and beauty of a woman.
8) There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.
9) A woman is four times as shy, six times as brave and eight times as lusty as a man.
10) Prostitutes don’t live in company of poor men, birds don’t build nests on a tree that doesn’t bear fruits and citizens never support a weak administration.

Action and Appointments
a) The Madras High Court stayed an inquiry into alleged accumulation of unaccounted wealth by 1990 batch Tamil Nadu cadre IAS officer C Umashankar. The interim injunction will be effective till June 28.
b) In the first major reshuffle after Jharkhand came under President’s rule, the government effected transfers of five IAS officials. Rajbala Verma, a 1983 batch Jharkhand cadre IAS, will now be the home secretary becoming only the second woman to become home secretary in the state.

3 comments:

  1. They are Brilliant. Simply Brilliant. Considering that they were conceived in 250B.C or so. A Brilliant strategist and professor of economics and political science at the ancient university of Taxila, Chanakya managed the first Mauryan emperor Chandragupta's rise to power at a young age. He is widely credited for having played an important role in the establishment of the Maurya Empire, which was the first empire in archaeologically recorded history to rule most of the Indian subcontinent. Every Indian should be familiar with Chanakya's ideas to play a role in todays society.

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  2. Needless to say Chanakya viewed women only as sex objects, true to the extremely patriarchal Indian culture.

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