What really matters and the purpose of it all...
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There was a long time, when joining IAS was what I wanted to do when I grew up (some school friends are still surprised that I haven't yet become an IAS officer :-)) . The attainment and rightful administration of power was the chosen way to improve the lot of fellow beings and rooting out the inefficiencies.
But then when pressed a little deeper, things started falling apart. Nehru's socialist policies were hailed in his day, now they are decried as having prevented us from unleashing our full potential....communism was panaecia only a few decades back, it now remains only a closet from which only brutalised skeletons of tin-pot dicatators fall out (maybe it would be just the other way round if the communists succeeded in the cold war)....two generations back you were hailed for urbanising forests, today you'll get the same prize for afforestation...consuming was bad yesterday, today that's what governments want their people to, tomorrow it might be bad again...the list can go on endlessly.
Very few administrators have the humility to accept that they don't know if what they're doing is good; that they're following a momentary paradigm (I'm talking of only the honest leaders here) which in the long run might cause more harm than good, or maybe not...it's a random game, because in reality they don't know. (Most will give you all sorts of ludicrous baloney to convince you otherwise...they'll even show you their momentary laurels in a bid to convice you and you will get convinced).
How many 'generations of moments' have we lost in trying to rectify the heroisms of a few moments....
The moment you're aware of the fallibility of your judgement in the overall scheme of things, the inherent uncertainty and doubt... that's when you're taking your first tentative step towards 'real' administration. But once you frankly admit your ignorance, you will also feel the need to 'know' things, more than administrating fellow beings as intelligent/ignorant as you. Administration, in fact every other activity, will flow as a result of this urge 'to know'...
The more and more I see, the more and more it appears to me this way... that all this song and dance, and poetry and music, and administration and philospohy, love, hate, procreation and annihilation.....it is all for the purpose of pushing that frontier of knowledge.
In the overall scheme of things, that is what 'really' matters.
There was a long time, when joining IAS was what I wanted to do when I grew up (some school friends are still surprised that I haven't yet become an IAS officer :-)) . The attainment and rightful administration of power was the chosen way to improve the lot of fellow beings and rooting out the inefficiencies.
But then when pressed a little deeper, things started falling apart. Nehru's socialist policies were hailed in his day, now they are decried as having prevented us from unleashing our full potential....communism was panaecia only a few decades back, it now remains only a closet from which only brutalised skeletons of tin-pot dicatators fall out (maybe it would be just the other way round if the communists succeeded in the cold war)....two generations back you were hailed for urbanising forests, today you'll get the same prize for afforestation...consuming was bad yesterday, today that's what governments want their people to, tomorrow it might be bad again...the list can go on endlessly.
Very few administrators have the humility to accept that they don't know if what they're doing is good; that they're following a momentary paradigm (I'm talking of only the honest leaders here) which in the long run might cause more harm than good, or maybe not...it's a random game, because in reality they don't know. (Most will give you all sorts of ludicrous baloney to convince you otherwise...they'll even show you their momentary laurels in a bid to convice you and you will get convinced).
How many 'generations of moments' have we lost in trying to rectify the heroisms of a few moments....
The moment you're aware of the fallibility of your judgement in the overall scheme of things, the inherent uncertainty and doubt... that's when you're taking your first tentative step towards 'real' administration. But once you frankly admit your ignorance, you will also feel the need to 'know' things, more than administrating fellow beings as intelligent/ignorant as you. Administration, in fact every other activity, will flow as a result of this urge 'to know'...
The more and more I see, the more and more it appears to me this way... that all this song and dance, and poetry and music, and administration and philospohy, love, hate, procreation and annihilation.....it is all for the purpose of pushing that frontier of knowledge.
In the overall scheme of things, that is what 'really' matters.
posted by Ayan Bhattacharya @ 10:30 AM
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