And God said “let there be light” and there was light. Those were of course, the pre-load shedding days. With light, the oceans and the rivers sprang up. Dales and valleys, mountains and deserts then formed. Thick forests sprouted. Venomous snakes and other dangerous animals came to inhabit them. And then God burst upon the idea of creating Adam and Eve. All was well till Eve ate the forbidden fruit and you know what happened thence.
One thing led to another and presently the earth’s population multiplied. And reached a stage where unless the current inhabitants vacated their places and made way for the new ones, there just would not be enough space on earth. Creation would stop and catastrophe would descend. Thus God then created a beautifully-conceived phenomenon called death. One by one, sometimes many together, started dying and left the earth. They had to be accommodated somewhere and so God created the Heaven. And, along with it, the Hell. And formed rules on which of the dead goes where – the good ones to the former and the sinned go to Hell. As the sinners invariably multiplied in geometric proportions, Hell became jam-packed very soon. God was fast running out of ideas. Surely, he cannot invent a second death for the already dead and send them to another domain! So, he started wracking his brains until the brilliant idea came to him, even though only as a stop-gap measure - why not create Hell in earth itself? That would save on transportation costs from earth to Hell of millions of sinful souls! And it would also be a kind of trailer for mankind to have an inkling beforehand (er...beforedeath) on what would follow, should one persist with his sinful ways!
And so the decision was made – Hells on earth itself. And God was kind enough to choose our country India, i.e. Bharat for this novel experiment. Thus came into being Sarkari Karyalays (Government Offices-GOs), the closest to Hell in intensity and ambience he could conceive of. What an idea, quite ahead of His times!
The striking similarity between Hell and the Indian Govt. Office cannot not escape any visitor. Take the visitor himself. Only the incorrigibly sinned could meet a fate of having to visit a Govt. office for getting some work done from a Babu. Take the place – cauldrons with boiling oil, Yamadhoots catching hold of hapless humans and rinsing them in hot oil, like deep-fried onion bajjis, wails of agony and pain….this typical narak scenario more than meets its match in the environment of a GO – creaking doors, groaning chairs, cracking plastering, tattered upholstery, dangling cobwebs, dingy corridors, stinking washrooms…. GO does manage to dish out good competition to Hell. More hellish than hell itself. The role of the Yama Dhoots is deftly handled by the army of our chaprasis, attenders and clerical assistants. The senior Bodo Babu (the Head Clerk, in capital H & C, in case you’ve not guessed) plays beautifully the Chitragupta’s role – going over the life accounts of the visitors, i.e. the relative weight of the wallets visitors would carry, balancing the credits and the debits and handing out appropriate retribution to each. Extracting from each according to his ability and driving out the vacillating and unrepentant souls by any, or a combination of several, or at times, all of these utterings – (i) Saab is in a meeting, come tomorrow (ii) Saab is not in town, come next week (iii) Saab has been transferred, don’t come at all (iv) Saab is dead but he will still see you, if you are monetarily inclined….
Being one among the tribe of such inveterate sinners, fate ordained me to one such Hell pretty early in my life – not as a visitor but as a visited. For two dreadful years of my early career life, I was consigned to an Income Tax Office in Madras. Next compound to where once stood the majestic Safire theatre edifice, in Thousand Lights area, Madras. With the right hellish flavor. The Chitragupta and Yamadhoots too were there aplenty in good measure. There I had the god-sent opportunity of sadistically relishing the travails of all the clueless sinned visitors to that piece of Hell – experienced Chartered Accountants, para-accountants (something like para-legals, in Grisham’s parlance), ex-bankers, businessmen, I have seen them all. Prince or pauper, millionaire or mendicant, pin-striped or the poorest, they must all submit humbly to our whims and do our biddings once they enter our hallowed Hellish portals. Why, upon entering, they would not even be able to spot us, what we being buried behind mountains of dusty files. The top-notch CA, having come with the assignment of gently cajoling me to locate his client’s file from among the millions stacked on my desk or from hundreds more haphazardly strewn on the wooden racks behind me and to forward the same to the Income Tax Officer, with my noting thereon. The para-legal, for that elusive refund order which has been made out two years back but has not still made its way to the post office and still hiding inside a file, waiting for its rightful owner to turn up and help it resume its journey. The poor auto-rickshaw driver with a passion for horse-racing, winning a jackpot for 25000 bucks but having got only 20000 bucks, patiently waiting for my audience for 2 hours so that I scribble a few words on his file and pass on the file to my ITO for that TDS refund of 5000…Yummy, what pleasure in seeing these wretched sinned ones suffer in silence! Coming to think of it, God need not have created a Hell far up in the skies in the first place. Our Bharatvarsh’s thousands of GOs could have served the purpose with more elan, far earlier. He should have known, for we had that uncanny ability to locate a file from among thousands and also to lose a file which was right on our desks a minute ago. We had greater skills in losing a file and once lost, not even God, forget about the lesser para-legals, could re-discover it. Sometimes, we ourselves could not un-lose what we just lost yesterday!
That particular unit of Hell where I worked had some scientifically evaluated contraptions to aid its routine functioning. The brass hemispherical bells on the tables used to summon a peon, rickety Remington Rands clickety-clicking away merrily, big 3’ x 5’paper card boards for each of the ITO and Assistant Commissioner, on which they placed their stationery and wrote out their assessment orders. The card boards occasionally also served the purpose of hiding their visages from the sundry Toms peeping into their chambers and also doubled up as the headrest one leaned forward on while power-napping. Our Saabs then used to make such mind-blowing assessment orders, which would give sleepless nights to the assessed. Assessment Orders which would witness appeals, appeals against appeals, appeals against appeals against appeals and would take 20 years to reach the unappealable stage. Not very unlike our death sentences, save for the Presidential reference. What pleasure, seeing these sinned mortals suffer! Each day in Office was one big picnic!
Another typical GO vestige is that Bombay Dyeing turkey towel always to be spotted at the back of the Saab’s seat. I don’t understand God’s purpose behind this, like where the practice all started– the towel on each chair. Typical of every GO’s every Saab’s chair! A perturbed visitor would glance inside the cabin of the Saab – if the Saab is visible on his chair, he would be worried about what assessment order he is writing; If the Saab is invisible but only the yellow striped turkey towel adorns his chair, he would be more terrified – about how many more months it would take to get his assessment order be done with…
Like the ‘Harry Potter and the sorcerer’ or whatever rubbish the film is called, sorcery, voodoo and black magic were very much to be seen in our Hell – perfectly enhancing the ambience. Like when you would sign a file, go out for a leak or a puff and return to your seat after 15 minutes and find to your consternation, that your right side drawer would be ajar with a 100 rupee note half jutting out. It certainly was not there when I left but I could perfectly understand why it is perched there right now. All due to the prowess of my scribbling my signature on a piece of paper, that’s it. Perhaps this is what Bible alludes to – ‘Ask and it shall be given unto you’. But I did not even ask….Fair play and honesty were to be found in abundance even in our Hell. If I find that mysterious 100 bucks to my right, I can be sure that 300 went to my boss, 50 to my head clerk and 20 to the Yamadhoot I was talking about in the first place i.e. my Chaprasi. Some mysterious guy from my unit (normally the dhoot in the last rung is assigned with such routine tasks) would have collected the ransom and would have shared the loot among all of us, in pre-determined ratios, and the loot would reach you, asked or unasked. Of this, I am sure about, even to this day.
I am suddenly reminded of another branch of God’s own Hell, this, a sprawling mansion on Strand Road in Calcutta, which goes by the name ‘Customs Office’ today. I had been there once, (long after I had abdicated my Thousand Lights throne of power) to invite a Commissioner of Customs to deliver a guest lecture at our Bank’s staff college. I could have as well attempted to cross the Great Wall of China. With a comrade in tow, I entered the building and was immediately greeted by two mongrels, scores of beggars and other scoundrels. Mobile tea-vending units were doing brisk business right inside the building. I reached a foyer and (mis)took it for the reception office. There was a big table and three guys were found parked on stools behind, chattering and smoking. I could faintly detect an odour of Four Square from the smoke and a Chekov from their chattering. You have to give it to Calcutta, their 10 year olds can (only?) talk of things which a 100 year old from the rest of India would not even heard of! .Digression apart, I gingerly approached the middle guy, mentioned the Commissioner Saab’s name and asked which way is his office.
“Suja giye bandheke” (straight and then left)
As we started, he interjected “Kintu apni paaben na unhake, aajke” (but you won’t find him today)
“Keno?”
“Jaanen na, ekhon to pujor samay-unhi bedathe giyechen…” (Don’t you know, this is (Durga) Puja time. He is out on a vacation)
But Pujo was a month away! And then I smacked my head. In Calcutta, the Puja fever catches on some 30 days before the actual Ashtami or Navami and so the whole Bengal goes on a celebratory mood a month before the actual festivities begin. For Govt. office mandarins, even much earlier. Go to any GO a month ahead of Puja and you need not even guess the standard reply to your questions of endearment- ‘pujor pore’ – after the pujas. Why, ‘pujor pore’ is much more than an expression of postponing duty or procrastinating. It beautifully reveals the Bengali spirit of “go home, forget the mundane, get ready for the celebrations, and then come back to reality. Even if it is a month before the bash..” The spirit, about time, the rest of India too latched on to.
It is another matter that I ultimately caught hold of an Assistant Commissioner in place of the Commissioner I originally envisaged and the guest lecture was consummated. Not that it made any big difference about who gave the lecture. For, all the lectured to were blissfully sleeping through the session.
Now where did I start? Ah, Hell and Govt. Offices. Yes, similarities abound as any casual visitor would observe, even today. But what the ‘Hell’, rather what the ‘GO’? We are Indians and we are like that only. We have survived these Hells this far and we would continue to. After all, God cannot crow about this ‘invention’ of his – these Hell units were discovered by the British and bequeathed to us long before God conceived of them.
And they, even today, after nearly 60 years of their consecration, continue to discharge their Hellish duty to the utmost satisfaction of the visitor and the visited. Souls are purged of their sins, their purses purged of their content. Only, inflation has ensured that the 100 rupee note jutting out of the right drawer of a modest Inspector of Income Tax 25 years ago has swollen to become a 1000 rupee note! But the ratio among the ITO, Inspector, Head clerk and the Yamadhoot still holds. Not a penny more to any one in the rung, not a penny less. Our Hell units are exemplary illustrations of honesty and fair-play!
image - from the web. But my office looked a lot better
One thing led to another and presently the earth’s population multiplied. And reached a stage where unless the current inhabitants vacated their places and made way for the new ones, there just would not be enough space on earth. Creation would stop and catastrophe would descend. Thus God then created a beautifully-conceived phenomenon called death. One by one, sometimes many together, started dying and left the earth. They had to be accommodated somewhere and so God created the Heaven. And, along with it, the Hell. And formed rules on which of the dead goes where – the good ones to the former and the sinned go to Hell. As the sinners invariably multiplied in geometric proportions, Hell became jam-packed very soon. God was fast running out of ideas. Surely, he cannot invent a second death for the already dead and send them to another domain! So, he started wracking his brains until the brilliant idea came to him, even though only as a stop-gap measure - why not create Hell in earth itself? That would save on transportation costs from earth to Hell of millions of sinful souls! And it would also be a kind of trailer for mankind to have an inkling beforehand (er...beforedeath) on what would follow, should one persist with his sinful ways!
And so the decision was made – Hells on earth itself. And God was kind enough to choose our country India, i.e. Bharat for this novel experiment. Thus came into being Sarkari Karyalays (Government Offices-GOs), the closest to Hell in intensity and ambience he could conceive of. What an idea, quite ahead of His times!
The striking similarity between Hell and the Indian Govt. Office cannot not escape any visitor. Take the visitor himself. Only the incorrigibly sinned could meet a fate of having to visit a Govt. office for getting some work done from a Babu. Take the place – cauldrons with boiling oil, Yamadhoots catching hold of hapless humans and rinsing them in hot oil, like deep-fried onion bajjis, wails of agony and pain….this typical narak scenario more than meets its match in the environment of a GO – creaking doors, groaning chairs, cracking plastering, tattered upholstery, dangling cobwebs, dingy corridors, stinking washrooms…. GO does manage to dish out good competition to Hell. More hellish than hell itself. The role of the Yama Dhoots is deftly handled by the army of our chaprasis, attenders and clerical assistants. The senior Bodo Babu (the Head Clerk, in capital H & C, in case you’ve not guessed) plays beautifully the Chitragupta’s role – going over the life accounts of the visitors, i.e. the relative weight of the wallets visitors would carry, balancing the credits and the debits and handing out appropriate retribution to each. Extracting from each according to his ability and driving out the vacillating and unrepentant souls by any, or a combination of several, or at times, all of these utterings – (i) Saab is in a meeting, come tomorrow (ii) Saab is not in town, come next week (iii) Saab has been transferred, don’t come at all (iv) Saab is dead but he will still see you, if you are monetarily inclined….
Being one among the tribe of such inveterate sinners, fate ordained me to one such Hell pretty early in my life – not as a visitor but as a visited. For two dreadful years of my early career life, I was consigned to an Income Tax Office in Madras. Next compound to where once stood the majestic Safire theatre edifice, in Thousand Lights area, Madras. With the right hellish flavor. The Chitragupta and Yamadhoots too were there aplenty in good measure. There I had the god-sent opportunity of sadistically relishing the travails of all the clueless sinned visitors to that piece of Hell – experienced Chartered Accountants, para-accountants (something like para-legals, in Grisham’s parlance), ex-bankers, businessmen, I have seen them all. Prince or pauper, millionaire or mendicant, pin-striped or the poorest, they must all submit humbly to our whims and do our biddings once they enter our hallowed Hellish portals. Why, upon entering, they would not even be able to spot us, what we being buried behind mountains of dusty files. The top-notch CA, having come with the assignment of gently cajoling me to locate his client’s file from among the millions stacked on my desk or from hundreds more haphazardly strewn on the wooden racks behind me and to forward the same to the Income Tax Officer, with my noting thereon. The para-legal, for that elusive refund order which has been made out two years back but has not still made its way to the post office and still hiding inside a file, waiting for its rightful owner to turn up and help it resume its journey. The poor auto-rickshaw driver with a passion for horse-racing, winning a jackpot for 25000 bucks but having got only 20000 bucks, patiently waiting for my audience for 2 hours so that I scribble a few words on his file and pass on the file to my ITO for that TDS refund of 5000…Yummy, what pleasure in seeing these wretched sinned ones suffer in silence! Coming to think of it, God need not have created a Hell far up in the skies in the first place. Our Bharatvarsh’s thousands of GOs could have served the purpose with more elan, far earlier. He should have known, for we had that uncanny ability to locate a file from among thousands and also to lose a file which was right on our desks a minute ago. We had greater skills in losing a file and once lost, not even God, forget about the lesser para-legals, could re-discover it. Sometimes, we ourselves could not un-lose what we just lost yesterday!
That particular unit of Hell where I worked had some scientifically evaluated contraptions to aid its routine functioning. The brass hemispherical bells on the tables used to summon a peon, rickety Remington Rands clickety-clicking away merrily, big 3’ x 5’paper card boards for each of the ITO and Assistant Commissioner, on which they placed their stationery and wrote out their assessment orders. The card boards occasionally also served the purpose of hiding their visages from the sundry Toms peeping into their chambers and also doubled up as the headrest one leaned forward on while power-napping. Our Saabs then used to make such mind-blowing assessment orders, which would give sleepless nights to the assessed. Assessment Orders which would witness appeals, appeals against appeals, appeals against appeals against appeals and would take 20 years to reach the unappealable stage. Not very unlike our death sentences, save for the Presidential reference. What pleasure, seeing these sinned mortals suffer! Each day in Office was one big picnic!
Another typical GO vestige is that Bombay Dyeing turkey towel always to be spotted at the back of the Saab’s seat. I don’t understand God’s purpose behind this, like where the practice all started– the towel on each chair. Typical of every GO’s every Saab’s chair! A perturbed visitor would glance inside the cabin of the Saab – if the Saab is visible on his chair, he would be worried about what assessment order he is writing; If the Saab is invisible but only the yellow striped turkey towel adorns his chair, he would be more terrified – about how many more months it would take to get his assessment order be done with…
Like the ‘Harry Potter and the sorcerer’ or whatever rubbish the film is called, sorcery, voodoo and black magic were very much to be seen in our Hell – perfectly enhancing the ambience. Like when you would sign a file, go out for a leak or a puff and return to your seat after 15 minutes and find to your consternation, that your right side drawer would be ajar with a 100 rupee note half jutting out. It certainly was not there when I left but I could perfectly understand why it is perched there right now. All due to the prowess of my scribbling my signature on a piece of paper, that’s it. Perhaps this is what Bible alludes to – ‘Ask and it shall be given unto you’. But I did not even ask….Fair play and honesty were to be found in abundance even in our Hell. If I find that mysterious 100 bucks to my right, I can be sure that 300 went to my boss, 50 to my head clerk and 20 to the Yamadhoot I was talking about in the first place i.e. my Chaprasi. Some mysterious guy from my unit (normally the dhoot in the last rung is assigned with such routine tasks) would have collected the ransom and would have shared the loot among all of us, in pre-determined ratios, and the loot would reach you, asked or unasked. Of this, I am sure about, even to this day.
I am suddenly reminded of another branch of God’s own Hell, this, a sprawling mansion on Strand Road in Calcutta, which goes by the name ‘Customs Office’ today. I had been there once, (long after I had abdicated my Thousand Lights throne of power) to invite a Commissioner of Customs to deliver a guest lecture at our Bank’s staff college. I could have as well attempted to cross the Great Wall of China. With a comrade in tow, I entered the building and was immediately greeted by two mongrels, scores of beggars and other scoundrels. Mobile tea-vending units were doing brisk business right inside the building. I reached a foyer and (mis)took it for the reception office. There was a big table and three guys were found parked on stools behind, chattering and smoking. I could faintly detect an odour of Four Square from the smoke and a Chekov from their chattering. You have to give it to Calcutta, their 10 year olds can (only?) talk of things which a 100 year old from the rest of India would not even heard of! .Digression apart, I gingerly approached the middle guy, mentioned the Commissioner Saab’s name and asked which way is his office.
“Suja giye bandheke” (straight and then left)
As we started, he interjected “Kintu apni paaben na unhake, aajke” (but you won’t find him today)
“Keno?”
“Jaanen na, ekhon to pujor samay-unhi bedathe giyechen…” (Don’t you know, this is (Durga) Puja time. He is out on a vacation)
But Pujo was a month away! And then I smacked my head. In Calcutta, the Puja fever catches on some 30 days before the actual Ashtami or Navami and so the whole Bengal goes on a celebratory mood a month before the actual festivities begin. For Govt. office mandarins, even much earlier. Go to any GO a month ahead of Puja and you need not even guess the standard reply to your questions of endearment- ‘pujor pore’ – after the pujas. Why, ‘pujor pore’ is much more than an expression of postponing duty or procrastinating. It beautifully reveals the Bengali spirit of “go home, forget the mundane, get ready for the celebrations, and then come back to reality. Even if it is a month before the bash..” The spirit, about time, the rest of India too latched on to.
It is another matter that I ultimately caught hold of an Assistant Commissioner in place of the Commissioner I originally envisaged and the guest lecture was consummated. Not that it made any big difference about who gave the lecture. For, all the lectured to were blissfully sleeping through the session.
Now where did I start? Ah, Hell and Govt. Offices. Yes, similarities abound as any casual visitor would observe, even today. But what the ‘Hell’, rather what the ‘GO’? We are Indians and we are like that only. We have survived these Hells this far and we would continue to. After all, God cannot crow about this ‘invention’ of his – these Hell units were discovered by the British and bequeathed to us long before God conceived of them.
And they, even today, after nearly 60 years of their consecration, continue to discharge their Hellish duty to the utmost satisfaction of the visitor and the visited. Souls are purged of their sins, their purses purged of their content. Only, inflation has ensured that the 100 rupee note jutting out of the right drawer of a modest Inspector of Income Tax 25 years ago has swollen to become a 1000 rupee note! But the ratio among the ITO, Inspector, Head clerk and the Yamadhoot still holds. Not a penny more to any one in the rung, not a penny less. Our Hell units are exemplary illustrations of honesty and fair-play!
image - from the web. But my office looked a lot better
