PolyTicks, DeMocKrazy & MumboJumbo: Babus, Mantris and Netas (Un)Making Our Nation

By Avay Shukla

An uproariously funny, no-holds-barred tussle with India's entire canvas: political culture and current affairs, the environment and conservation, the bureaucracy and governance, legal matters, social issues, societal peccadilloes, and anything else that can be lampooned.

The foibles

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pippa Rann Books & Media
• Release date: Aug 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913738013

Book preview

FOREWORD

Avay Shukla is no ordinary blogger. He is a former senior bureaucrat in the Government of India, now retired but armed with a formidable (nearly) four decades of experience administering the complexities of Indian governance. He was clearly no ordinary bureaucrat, either, for he wields an incisive pen, a highly effective vocabulary – and a style so original, so witty and often so devastating that his file notations must have been classics in their own right!

I have never met Avay Shukla. My knowledge of him is, in contemporary terms, virtual: I know him from his blogs. These were written, it seems, for a circle of friends, but have been circulated widely around the internet. I first came across his work because a number of unrelated friends (unrelated to him, and to each other) kept passing me his blog on Delhi’s parties (the social ones, not the political). I had never read anything like it: a brilliant, hilarious and painfully accurate takedown of a phenomenon so ubiquitous in the nation’s capital that one never quite notices how absurd it seems – until one sees it through the eyes of the detached and sardonic observer, a role Shukla plays to perfection. Read it, and you will never feel the same about the next dinner party you attend in Delhi.

But Shukla’s sharp eye is not limited to social observation. With his knowledge, experience and command of a wide variety of subjects – in keeping with the fabled omniscience of his tribe, the Indian Administrative Service – he is equally insightful analysing government projects and schemes, the follies and failures of rural development and the nation’s congested roadways. Every subject is tackled with a command of both subject and language that make his conclusions impossible to resist, however apocalyptic some of them might be. Some of his writing is satirical, but much of it is infused with a burning passion for the issues that matter in India, tinged perhaps with the disillusionment of one who has seen it all and found it wanting.

Despite having been a participant and a decision-maker on many of the issues he writes about, Shukla is unsparing in his insights, and sometimes savage in his critiques. But his blogs are marked by a searing honesty which leavens some of the harshness of his judgements. He seems to blame himself and the country he loves for its deficiencies, and – I say this without the benefit of ever having discussed any of his blogs with him – a burning conviction that it is time to rid oneself of the cant and hypocrisy that is too often used to justify official pronouncements and claims.

I admire his willingness to call a spade a bloody shovel. There is no hint of self-censorship in his writings, though to my dismay he did delete one blog, an excoriating survey of the current state of the country after years of its present government, at the urging of apprehensive friends. I read it, once, before he deleted it, and marvelled that he had, with such acuity and concision, summarised in 1000 words what it had taken me 500 pages to say in my survey of the same era, The Paradoxical Prime Minister. That talent for brevity makes him the ideal blogger – somebody who has something to say, and does so readably and pithily, at digestible length for today’s time-starved reader.

All of this makes Avay Shukla’s blogs eminently worth reading for anyone who cares about India, about where it is going and how it got this way. I congratulate Prabhu Guptara for assembling this collection of Avay Shukla’s work and hope it finds the wide and discerning readership it deserves, well beyond the transience of its original medium in cyberspace.

Shashi Tharoor, September 2019

Acknowledgements

The pieces in this book were originally written as blogs for my blogsite, View From (Greater) Kailash, beginning 2014. The idea of compiling them in book form was suggested by my family, friends and readers - and I am indeed grateful to them for hounding me till I finally did something about it!

My deepest gratitude to Dr. Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament, one of India’s leading writers in English and a profoundly eclectic thinker and commentator on current events, for having written the Foreword to this book. Dr. Tharoor needs no introduction to anyone who has even a nodding acquaintance with the English language, and I have been an avid follower of his writing for a long time. It may, however, surprise the reader to learn that the two of us had never met, or even spoken to each other, before the writing of this Foreword! Having read some of my blogs (conveyed through a common friend), Dr. Tharoor readily agreed to pen the Foreword when approached by my publisher. I am humbled by Dr. Tharoor’s graciousness, goodness of heart, and confidence in me. Needless to say, it is an honour for any aspiring or even established writer to have Dr. Tharoor’s name associated in any manner with his work.

I am also indebted to Mr. Ravinder Makhaik, Editor of the Hillpost, who provided me a second platform for my articles. Since 2014 he has posted all of more than 300 of my blogs on his website. His unwavering support has not only given me the confidence to continue but has also helped immensely in enlarging my readership base.

A very special thank you is due to my publisher, for kindly offering to publish a collection of my work. Not only has he kept faith in me but he has also spent long, painstaking hours in going over each article, each turn of phrase, design of the book, covers, etc. to ensure that the end product is an impeccable experience for the reader. He has been more of a friend and not merely a publisher.

It would be remiss of me to neglect recording my appreciation for our youthful pictorial artist and cartoonist, Vikash Upadhyay, from my very own Himachal Pradesh, for the superlative rendition of the cover of the book and the additional cartoon which accompanies the contents. Working only on ideas conveyed on email, he was able to intuitively grasp the irony and satire infusing the articles, and his drawings convey their essence and tenor perfectly. Rarely have picture and words complemented each other so effortlessly.

There are many more, too many to name, but they know who they are and that their names are permanently etched in my heart.

Avay Shukla, Village Puranikoti,

Shimla Hills, 10 August 2020

Introduction

Writing should be an expression of freedom – of thoughts, views and statements. But this needs two prerequisites: an environment that does not censor, and a medium of expression. In the India of today, sadly, both are missing, or at least tightly constrained. An undeclared form of censorship has been imposed on most of the media, partly to comply with the broad hints given out by the government of the day and partly to protect corporate interests of Big Capital which controls all media today – print, television and digital. Independent writers, therefore, find it well nigh impossible to find a platform to air their views and opinions at a time when objective journalism is a rarity and has been reduced to devious advertising and mendacious propaganda. So where does the free thinker and writer go to express himself?

To the Blog. The humble blog is the truest expression of what the people think and feel, because it needs no intermediaries, is not constrained by editorial policy, its author doesn’t have to find acceptance in any journalistic coterie or club, he is not subject to any official leverage, it even provides a degree of anonymity if this is preferred. It is the genuine Vox Populi. The blog is the faithful chronicle of our digital age, and the blogger of today is the Charles Lamb and Samuel Pepys of earlier days.

I started my blogsite, View From (Greater) Kailash, in 2013, shortly after I retired from the government, mainly to stay in touch with friends, colleagues and like-minded persons. Today, six years down the road, it has become a passion: there have been more than 300 blogs so far and the readership has expanded far beyond the originally conceived audience. They now get posted also on other sites and portals, with and without my permission! But I am not complaining, for as Oscar Wilde said: The best thing to do with free advice is to pass it on.

An aware citizen in these dystopic times cannot but be critical of some of the social and political developments playing out. But criticism simpliciter can also offend, turn off the reader, and occasionally also get one into trouble with defamation and other speech-stifling laws. I discovered long ago that the best medium of criticism is humour, irony and satire: this rarely offends, yet drives the point home, because humour cunningly disarms us of our prejudices and pre-conceived notions and makes us think afresh. Its purpose and effectiveness have been brilliantly explained by Michael J Socolow in an article dated May the 11th, 2018. Aptly titled: In Its Heyday MAD Magazine Was A Lot More Than Silly Jokes and available at smithsonian.com, he states that satire generates a healthy scepticism by holding up a mirror to our gullibility. This is necessary because everyone is lying to you, including magazines. Think for yourself, question authority. In this article, Mr. Socolow was analysing the essence of MAD magazine. Humour is not, therefore, as we say in India, time-pass. It is a very effective tool for reviving our dormant critical faculties, holding to account governments and thought leaders of society. It is also difficult to rebut or deny. Notwithstanding its format, it is serious business.

The 50-odd pieces in this book attempt to follow the pioneering furrow carved out by MAD magazine and writers such as Mr. Horowitz of The New Yorker. They traverse a six-year period from 2014 into 2020 and cover subjects as varied as high society dinners, judicial oddities, the arcane mumbo jumbo of economics, politicians and their misdeeds, social peccadilloes, the absurdity of some government policies, and inanity of television channels.

My essential message is: there is life beyond the headlines and Breaking News, and it can be funny!

Avay Shukla, Village Puranikoti,

Shimla Hills, 10 August 2020

2014

DELHI – THE CITY OF HONEY BADGERS

Saturday, 19 July 2014

I retired from the government in 2010 after having rendered 35 years of dubious service to the public, and settled down in a cottage in the midst of thick forests near Mashobra, about twenty kilometers from Shimla. This area being even colder than Shimla I had no T shirts, so when I had to suddenly move to a different kind of jungle called New Delhi I was (what would today be described as) sartorially challenged. My younger son gifted me a T shirt: it had a picture of an intense looking honey badger on the chest with the caption in bold letters: DON’T GIVE A SHIT!

Now, honey badgers belong to the raccoon family and are about the same size. They are utterly fearless and have been known to make even leopards back off: they will eat anything and can consume twenty five percent of their body weight at one sitting; no sensible animal will tangle with a honey badger, at least not a second time! Therefore the caption on the T shirt was spot on – the honey badger doesn’t give a shit about anyone or anything. In short, it has an ATTITUDE.

Thirty-five years in government had made one cautious and conservative in expression: bureaucrats never call a shit a shit, we leave that to the armed forces. Therefore, I was a bit non-plussed with the T shirt’s assertive caption and, hoping that the courage to wear it would devolve in the fullness of time, I locked it away along with my Aam Aadmi cap and the faded photo of myself as the seventh dwarf in a rendition of Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarfs we had put up in nursery school many decades ago. You get the drift: all three were meaningful objects, but required a certain boldness, a nonchalance, a sangfroid to be able to exhibit in public, which I lacked.

However, you can lock away a honey badger T shirt (or an Aam Aadmi cap) but you can’t forget it. So the longer I stayed in Delhi the more it weighed on my mind. There was a niggling feeling at the back of my medulla oblongata that I was missing something, that there was some message embedded in the badger’s attitude, a Da Vinci type of code, if you will. Try as I might my mind, weakened by years of perusing the gibberish contained in government files, couldn’t grasp it. And then one day, standing outside the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, I had my Eureka moment. All around me the pavements were swarming with families of patients going about their daily chores – cooking, washing, defecating, breast-feeding – while waiting for their turn in this Mecca of medical salvation. There was no other accommodation available for these people who had come from all over India. The nearby bus shelters and under-passes were also full of them. The temperature was at least 40 degrees. Nobody gave this miserable flotsam of humanity a second glance. Around them the BMWs and Audis, the red beaconed VIP cars whizzed past, their occupants – both corporate and governmental – planning how to make India a superpower; a huge swathe of area had been cleared of all traffic and people because Mr. Amar Singh had arrived to be lodged (naturally) in one of the VIP wards (his kidneys having given up after years of his wheeling and dealing), the hawkers plied their trade, the policemen and parking attendants went about their extortion openly, the luckier patients who had been able to see an AIIMS doctor (a mythological creature like Bigfoot or the Yeti for most of those on the pavements) lining up in hordes at the dozens of medical shops selling what the hospital should have been providing, or perhaps what the hospital HAD provided! No one even glanced at the mass of forgotten humanity on the pavements.

In that instant the code was cracked! NOBODY GAVE A SHIT. The average Delhi-ite was a honey badger!

Start from the top of the ordurous heap that is Delhi and you will see what I mean. The politician is so comfortably cocooned in his LOOTyen’s Delhi that he doesn’t give a shit how people survive outside it. How, for example, can we legitimately expect Mrs. Shiela Dikshit to give a shit (no pun intended) about power cuts in Trilokpuri, for example, when her own mansion is cooled by 31 air-conditioners and 15 coolers at government expense (a recent report in The Hindustan Times)?

The bureaucrat doesn’t give a shit about anything because he gets priority in school admissions, hospitals, rail reservations; subsidised housing and transport, membership of the Delhi Golf Club; and can drink himself silly on subsidised booze at Gymkhana.

The captains of industry don’t give a shit because they live on Aurangzeb Road in houses financed by loans from banks (read you and I) which are subsequently written off as non-performing assets (don’t miss the distinctly sexual connotation here – and you thought that bankers don’t have a sense of humour?!), spend most of their waking hours rubbing shoulders and exchanging notes (pun intended) with the commissars of government, and take their annual vacations in Davos.

And so it is down the food chain. The police don’t give a shit because they have turned the rule of accountability on its head: having acquired their postings by dint of loyal service to politicians or by spreading the shekels among their superiors, the latter are now accountable to THEM! Likewise the municipal employees. Others – lawyers, doctors, autorickshaw wallahs, transport employees – have such a pernicious and all-pervasive nuisance value that they don’t have to give a shit about anyone, be it the courts, the government or the general public. No one gives a damn about the environment – not the Forest Department which sees its primary role as giving permissions for felling of thousands of trees every year, not the PWD whose sole mission is to destroy the Delhi Ridge as soon as possible, not the DDA or Jal Board (Water Board) which cannot distinguish between a river and a sewer line, not the builders pumping millions of litres of under groundwater without any approvals.

The alpha male of these badgers, however, has to be the Delhi motorist. His aggression, single minded objective of running over anything in his path, refusal to give way to ambulances and fire engines, propensity to shoot other motorists, contempt for rules and traffic policemen – all indicate that this sub species is still evolving and may one day take over the whole city.

At the bottom of the food chain are the people who GET all the shit: the humble, ordinary folks going about their daily chore of just surviving in this jungle. But sometimes, say once in two or three years when they are pushed to the wall, they revolt and attack in true badger style. On such rare occasions they too don’t give a shit – burning buses and police vehicles, facing water cannons, clashing with police, shutting down large parts of this dung heap. The latest such incident was in December 2012.

And so Delhi is now the most polluted city in the world. Of all Indian cities it has the highest number of cases of sexual molestation, rape and car thefts. Twelve hundred people die in road accidents every year. Sixty percent of its population lives in slums (which the government has abolished by calling them instead JJ clusters or unauthorised colonies). It has lost 25% of its green lungs – the Ridge – in the last fifteen years to construction, mining and encroachment by the same Davos types mentioned earlier. The Yamuna is, scientifically speaking, no longer a river but a drain – only 5% of its total length lies in Delhi but this city contributes to 80% of its pollution: when the river leaves Delhi it is organically dead.

It is scientifically proved that species evolve to suit – and better confront – their external environment. That is exactly what the honey badgers of Delhi are doing. Delhi’s environment has been continuously changing for the last thousand years or so – don’t forget that today’s Delhi is the seventh city on this site. From being the centre of Mughal culture, British imperialism and old world gentility it has now become some kind of smorgasbord of the worst qualities of its neighbouring states, the arrogance of power, the corrupting influence of money, and the unruliness of millions of migrants who have no stakes in the city. You just can’t afford to give a shit here.

Next month, to commemorate the completion of three years of my stay here, I propose to take out that honey badger T-shirt and proudly don it (the AAM AADMI cap will have to wait a bit longer). I’ve earned the privilege of being a honey badger.

TIHAR REGENCY

Monday, 13 October 2014

This is the century of Private Capital. While governments involve themselves in waging wars and making life as difficult as possible for their citizens it is the private sector that is pushing forward the frontiers of economic development and spawning the innovations that will make life sustainable in the years to come. It is private enterprise and entrepreneurship again which is (happily for all of us) ensuring that governments are becoming more and more irrelevant to the life of the common citizen – whether it is Twitter and Facebook for information sharing, or Dupont and Suzlon for renewable energy sources of the future, or Amazon and Ali Baba for creating freer markets. It should surprise no one, therefore, that MacDonalds and Coca Cola have conquered more countries than all of Mr. Obama’s armies, or that just the combined Brand values of just four companies – Apple, Google, Coca Cola and IBM – at US$ 380 billion, is more than the total foreign reserves of India!

In this changing environment, therefore, Mr. Modi is spot on in stressing the primacy of the private sector in developing the country’s economy, in sectors as diverse as defense production, power, infrastructure, tourism, food processing, housing and so on. But he appears to have neglected one critical sector which of late has become a magnet for powerful politicians, bureaucrats, corporates and well connected criminals, a sector which is like, pardon the pun, a holding company for all kinds of dubious operators. I refer, of course, to our prisons.

I owe this path-breaking realisation to a very close friend of mine who is a successful hotelier in Shimla. Looking around for his next project, his usual fertile imagination bolstered by a couple of single malts, he voiced the desire to build a five-star hotel in Tihar Jail of Delhi, exclusively for its convicted inmates (or at least those who could afford to pay for it). If this sounds crazy to you, just list out the crazy ideas of a few decades ago which now go by brand names such as Gillette, KFC, Otis, Hoover, Ford, Frigidaire, or by product names such as submarines, steam engines, telephones, airplanes, even the humble condom for God’s sake! To slightly alter a Shakespearean phrase – those whom the Gods would make billionaires, they first make crazy.

The more I think of a luxury hotel in Tihar the more sense it makes to me. After all, prisons in the US and UK have been handed over to private companies for their running and management, and even Tihar has its own snacks making division, a furniture unit and even has a food-court, all under the brand name TJ.