Celebrating mediocrity !

Celebrating mediocrity!

If you have the brains of a mouse, come to Orissa ! This the land of mediocrity where you will be honoured and feted like a celebrity!

Just look around you and you will see cretins everywhere! In every field and profession, idiots rule the roost! You have “baristha sambadikas” or senior journalists who do not belong to any news paper, but are treated with reverence and awe! Since they are idle, they are invited to seminars and workshops where they wax eloquent on all diverse topics under the sun ……from child labour to Buddhist relics !

A few of them also dub themselves as “sthambakars” or columnists. Their columns reek of incompetence being full of puerile garbage rarely deserving more than five seconds of reading time! Their stupid and hoary opinions are inanely irrelevant since they are bereft of facts. If you do find any facts, be sure that is shamelessly filched from English papers!

But they do enjoy the full benefits of a senior accredited hack! Spacious government quarters in the heart of the city and all other concessions and benefits. I wonder how they feed their family, if they do not have a regular salary!

I pity the hard working regular journos on the payrolls of the dailies slogging away day and night for their story, dreading the rap from their editors if they fail deadlines!

Then there are the netas who badly need brain surgery. No not for replacement but implant of the grey matter. People not fit to be even Sarpanchs suddenly find themselves catapulted to the Assembly as MLAs! Confronted by the voluminous official papers which frankly speaking few can comprehend, they happily doze off. Being privileged members of various standing committees of the house, they get the chance to summon the slippery babus and review their activities.

Predictably, the babus have the last laugh! It is child’s play for them to fool the half educated netas who cannot understand simple English, leave aside the subject matter which might be esoterically incomprehensible. Many of these politicos who represent remote tribal areas of Orissa are understandably uncomfortable summoning officials to appear before them.

How can they forget their earlier nasty experiences dealing with babus in the districts! Many of them must have spent hours sweating outside the sprawling bungalow of the DC waiting for an audience! For them officers continue to be the “mai baap sarkar,” supreme and unquestionable!

Contrarily, the wily coastal district MLAs are old foxes, adept at shadow boxing with babudom. If honest requests fail to elicit information, abuses and threats follow ! Pronto the missing file surfaces from the dark depths of the cupboards ! Remember, a babu is a brave creature within the four corners of his house ; when he shouts at his domestic help!

As everyone knows the Queen has taken a backseat and has given the moronic babus a free run which has pumped up their pea sized egos!

However, when you deal with them, you will be shocked by their incompetence and ignorance levels! Most of them do not understand computers or email or internet and thus have to depend upon their PAs who themselves are semi literates in IT. Now all secretariat offices have computers but the babu still calls out dictation to his PA who dutifully types it out in the computer and produces a so called “draft”. Only after this is checked, the final print out is taken. And if the PA is absent, work comes to a grinding halt. What is the use of giving them computers when they still do not type out the matter!

As you know folks, even a 7 year old child is a computer wiz nowadays after Bill Gates liberated us from the difficult to remember DOS commands!

Many of the babus are terribly out of touch with the real world and do not understand modern terms like BPO, real time information system, peer evaluation, zero based budgeting, etc. Their GK is eminently absent!

A reporter who used to work with Associated Press once tried to meet the CM. When he said that he represented AP, the PR staff said “oh you are from Andra Pradesh.” Repeated attempts to explain that he was from one of the world’s largest wire services drew a blank. They had not heard of AP! And I am talking about the PR department, not some admin department!

We have police officers who run at the sight of a rat heading the force. How can you ever expect them to put down the Naxal menace? If you remember, three years ago, the DGP had visited Koraput and other areas in mufti and had used a hired taxi. How can such a nincompoop ever protect our lives?

Then you have half of the state’s literate population going around with doctorates in their pockets. The upstart Chancellor of the only private university in the state (a huge career jump from his earlier career as librarian of a nondescript rural college) is a “Dr”. The chief of a local newspaper is also a doctorate. Almost all the Oriya writers are “Dr.” These fools think that a Ph.d degree entitles them to prefix “Dr.” ! The honorific is used only by medical doctors, people who relieve you from your pain and of course money!

However, this obsession with “Dr.” continues. Many of these are also honorary doctorates obtained from shady universities who gladly shell them out for a small donation! Freud would say that it is their way of overcoming the supremely inferiority complex!

Now the real doctors are rarely able to diagnose your ailment, forget about prescribing the correct medication. You have lawyers here who barely know English language, forget their knowledge of law. Ironically, some of them count themselves as leading legal luminaries. Once you hear them arguing in the courts you will wonder how they got their law degrees!

Oriya cinema has failed to produce good commercial films fit for a national screening. They are still stuck with the weepy family soap dramas ………there will be a tyrannically evil zamindar with oversized moustaches and a thick chain like gold chain He will have his lecherous eye on the innocent daughter of the poor farmer who of course is in love with the local village boy … blah....blah……..

Come on producers grow up! These were the subjects of the 1960s. The few Oriya directors who are good have not seen prosperous careers, unable to progress beyond a few art films which of course have fetched them national awards. Will they please step forward and free the local films from the grip of these cretin directors and writers?

Now the actors! The heroines apart from delivering jhatkas rarely emote. The only emotion they know is shedding copious tears so that they do not have to act! Their jaded looks, atrociously gaudy dress sense and dated acting makes one doze off in the halls. Even their bloody make up sucks!

The new breed of Oriya heroes who are trying to make their mark are good in calisthenics and weight pumping. It is difficult to understand whether they are working out on the sets or doing a dance! Many of the dances look truly funny resembling a burlesque by epileptics with arms and torsos being whipped into jerks !

Then you have the ersatz intellectuals gracing functions or meetings. Rarely do they come prepared for the topic and usually you will find them rambling incomprehensibly about irrelevant issues. At one such gathering, three years ago, a distinguished resource person went on babbling about his tremendous sense of imagination and how he loves Socrates's thoughts ! Don’t think the seminar was on Greek philosophy! It was on the “Impact of the super cyclone on the girl child!”

And God forbid if they are retired babus! You will be tortured with apocryphal stories of they could manage to achieve impossibly difficult tasks and how they have always rebuffed the netas in their uneventful careers! Pure BS, I must say! If that would be case then we would have Ram Rajya in our state!

It is also a growing trend nowadays to invite senior babus to grace public functions as there is only one neta in the state with a public life, i.e., the Queen himself! Even retired babus will do, since they are thrilled to sit on the stage after spending a lifetime hiding behind unfinished files!

Another thing I hate about these sabhas and karmashalas is that the speakers who are supposed to enlighten you on the concerned topic, often launch an unabashed eulogy of the host and go on thanking him forever. Then the bloody event withers away into one huge mutual admiration exercise where everyone praises the other and his dubious achievements! Why can’t we have seminars where precious time is not wasted on these perfectly dispensable time wasting speeches?

So dear folks! In this land of mediocrity what do you do?

Descend to these ridiculous levels of mediocrity yourself ? Or blaze a lone path yourself ?