Saturday, August 11, 2012

Are Indian bureaucrats a serious, longfaced, boring breed? Not really

IAS officer Alex Paul Menon who was kidnapped by Left wing extremists in Chhattisgarh, uploaded this photo in Facebook recently. It’s not about red terror but a simple shot depicting problems of a girl and a boy. He tweeted to say: “When it comes to other better districts. .. It’s the situation of a girl. Sukma is a lonely boy”. Menon was till recently the collector of Chhattisgarh's backward district of Sukma before he was appointed as CEO of Raipur Development Authority. 
Don’t think bureaucrats are too boring to think beyond file notings. Yes, many of them raise serious issues like governance, corruption, security, administration etc., also in social media. But here are 4 samples of bureaucrats’ Tweets which may help babus shedding their tag of “a boring, long-faced, unsmiling, serious breed”.
1. Amitabh Kant, a bureaucrat by mind and brand guru by heart, recently posted a New York Times’ link with a comment, “Eating with hands is a highly spiritual, sensual and emotional experience…” The NYT article quoted one Indian cook book author to say how eating with the hands evokes “great emotion”. “It kindles something very warm and gentle and caressing. Using a fork is unthinkable in traditional Indian eating. It is almost like a weapon,” the author was quoted in the newspaper article.

2. Varsha Joshi, an IAS officer and director of Census Operation in Delhi, has recently posted a YouTube link of The Beatles - The Inner Light. Her comment: “What a remarkable composition Harrison’s "The Inner Light" really is! Western notes, Indian instruments, Chinese lyrics, and so together too”.

3. Indian Foreign Service officer and Indian ambassador to South Korea Vishnu Prakash tweeted: “No comment! Oxford Univ relaxes academic dress code, men can wear skirts/ stockings & women suits or white bow ties”. Here is another Tweet: “Amazing! California now spends $8000 annually on each school kid but $47,000 on each prisoner. Prison budget twice as much univ budget”.

4. IAS officer Srivatsa Krishna, who is also a writer and vocalist, retweeted someone called Don Key: “When I first saw Gopal Kanda on TV, I thought how could Sanjay Leela Bhansali do this”. Yes, many others too noticed the striking similarity between the two when TV news channels first flashed Kanda’s photo in air hostess Geetika Sharma suicide case.

1 comment:

  1. Babus are always interesting people in private. But only thing they don't show their lighter side in public. Good samples of comments. Like the comment about Amitabh Kant, "bureaucrat by mind, brand guru by heart"

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