Article - 25 Week 34 ~ Theist in a Foxhole:

Article - 25 Week 34 ~ Theist in a Foxhole:

“As with the Rajput or Mughal courts,chronic intrigues and sycophancy had also corroded the motivations of the officers in the government and even in business. Sincere, able and honest ,officers were undermined and superseded by others with greater charm, connections, manners, and flattery. Truth was not welcome and the bearers of bad news, as in most despotic societies, often faced ridicule or punishment. It was much easier to find excuses and to blame others or to fatalistically surrender to destiny.”  Murad Ali Baig, Journalist, in his book “History, Mythology & Religion”


Indian shipping industry rolls itself in the cultural mud of mediocrity. MSC Chitra’s floundering & leaking, MbPT gas leaks, a near stagnant home tonnage, and the ever shrinking global job pie for the Indian seamen and marine professionals are not really as dreadful as the manner in which they are handled and given directions to. Are we in a foxhole?



We have fallen into the habit of worshiping the hero and bashing the fallen – never looking at the chains that bind the fallen or at times unleash a hero. We need to appreciate the difference between management & managers, administration & administrators, bureaucracy and bureaucrats, governance and politicians. Despite the apparent close interlinks, former is mostly immune to the later. The former is like the software in the system. If this software or the processing method is faulty, the quality of the hardware - the people behind the system - can seldom do any thing outstanding. Paradoxically, we are a nation of brilliant bureaucrats, technocrats, political philosophers, politicians, administrators, managers, and entrepreneurs with a naked manifestation of demented & rotten bureaucracy, debased politics, inept administration, mediocre management system, and a grinding vacuum in entrepreneurial adventures.

Where do you think we have gone are wrong? It’s our obsession with hero or raja worshipping to the point of believing them to be infallible and having the ability to solve all our problems. Be it a Manmohan Singh, a Sonia, a Tendulkar, a Sridharan, a Jagmohan or Abdul Kalam Azad. They are merely individual brilliances who represent an infinitesimal fraction of our collective creativity. These brilliances in fact mislead us into believing that all wrongs can be righted when we would have sufficient such individuals at the helm of affairs - as if in a dream sequence. So we wait agonizingly with our usual rant, rave and blather of witch-hunting.

Though serendipity could be a surprise guest in the avatar of a few heroes who could break the shackles, our high expectations would guide us no where. Pragmatism is the need of the day – not idealism and shallow dreams. Our system stinks. It’s winding, callous, unresponsive, unaccountable, manipulative, complex, hidden behind crafty words, primitive, wasteful, unjust, unfair, exploitative, anti-citizen, hubristic, and in one simple word ‘dumb’. Putting a bunch of smart pundits in a dumb kingdom, converts the pundits not the kingdom. The pundits draw their sustenance from the dumb kingdom. It is time as Indian citizens, we ask questions at the system not the mandarins who run it. Questions as to why the system of administration in the Shipping Ministry, DG Shipping, Customs, Port Authorities and myriad such institutions should not be dismantled and replaced with effective ones? Are these institutional frameworks and systems not part of our key infrastructure? When we are spending billions on physical infrastructure why can’t we change these key areas of infrastructure that needs no such humongous investment?

Alas! All we would be slapped with would be another lazy cow called ‘ Ministry Of Administrative Reforms’! Can we have such honest cogs as agility, nimbleness, fairness, justice, responsiveness, progressiveness, simplicity, directness, transparency, accountability, public welfare and pragmatism in building our institutional infrastructure?