Inheritance of Looks

The regular reflex of a rational man on receiving the news of a new born is to congratulate. But even before he is done with it, he pops up the question which creates an identity crisis. Literally. "Whom does the baby resemble?" To me, infancy is the closest that anything can get to Communism. Like puppies and Iphones, I find all the babies same. They may vary in size and shade, but they all look alike to me. It also my firm belief that they appear same to everyone. How else would you explain couples with infants changing their whatsapp DP on a daily basis. The picture is always that of the baby. Just the color of the baby's shirt changes. The only motive behind this mundane ritual is to help the parents identify their baby in case he chooses to join a melee of his friends in a mall or at a park. This anecdotal evidence saves me from being embarrassed about my personal disability.

Amongst my innumerable cerebral handicaps is my inability to identify people. The best I can get to is to categorize the faces as "familiar" and "unfamiliar". While people solve crosswords or Sodukus for intellectual stimulus, my favorite pastime is to recollect the name of the person who greeted me in the lift as I entered the office. Such puzzles often keep me engaged for days. Even a smartphone without a camera will do a better job at facial recognition than me. With such acute problem, it is too onerous a task to trace the ancestry of a baby's facial features.

It is also not always the case that a child would exactly resemble the parents. As a kid, I vividly recollect my parents telling nosy guests that I resemble my paternal grandmother while my brother got his looks from our maternal grandfather. The guests never met either of my grandparents and the conversation soon moved to other equally pointless subjects like politics and neighbours. While both of us do have certain features of our respective progenitors, I still doubt if the answer was entirely true. We would, probably, know only when we grow as old as them. However, an astute analysis of the answer reveals that it maintains the delicate balance of between patriarchy and matriarchy. An apocryphal theory is that the incessant wars between my parents on my resemblance came to an end with the arrival of my brother and the subsequent equitable settlement on the claims over the genetic propagation of their respective families. 

In my case, however, there is no such fight for supremacy. I am more than willing to let my better half take the credit for my newborn's looks for I know the horrors that lurk in the future if he takes after me. The ordeal of living with a visage that neither inspires confidence nor invokes sympathy would be the running theme of my autobiography, if I ever write one. But such self-effacing doesn't come to my rescue because people want an answer.

It took me a few falters before I discovered a bureaucratic way out of the conundrum. Pass the buck. So now, when people ask me about the looks of my son, my cheeky repartee is, "You tell me". While it has provided me some respite, it failed to throw up an answer. Well, it is stupid to expect solutions from bureaucratic processes. In the instant case, the result of the exercise reeked of participant bias. Respondents from my phonebook unanimously declared that he looks like me while those from my wife's bet their life that he resembled her.

At this point, it is only fair that a few facts be disclosed for a correct understanding of the results. It happens that the arresting feature of my little one is his nose. Broad and flat, like both his parents have. Just that it looks cute on him and functional on us. For my wife, it isn't her best feature; for me, it isn't the worst. We have made peace with ours. But our maid, who gives the boy his daily massage, unfailingly nudges his nose upwards. My mother, who has been there and done that, smirks at both her effort and my wife's hope. I, however, have no qualms with it. Long ago, somewhere around the time I realized the finality of my nasal aesthetics,  I irretrievably concluded that sharpness of nose is inversely related to that of the mind. I cite our only Prime Minister without a majority to successfully complete his term as the best testimony to my hypothesis.

So when people take his nose as the clinching evidence to settle the issue of his resemblance, it is only natural that it would throw up mixed results. The whole process further reinforced my indifference on the subject. No matter how far I look back into the genealogy of either of my son's parents, I hardly find anything that is even remotely remarkable. But what amuses me is that before he learned to talk, he managed to polarize an entire bunch of mature educated adults within a fortnight of his arrival into this world. Probably, it is the telltale sign of the times we live in.

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Krishna Connection

Vijayawada. That is the place chosen for me to begin my career. Everyone would like to work in metros and big cities. That is where the action for IRS lies. Big cases, complicated issues and ingenious chartered accountants collude to sharpen the learning curve. But small towns have their own charm, I was told. If you dispute my terming of Vijayawada as a ‘small town’, all I can say in defense is that small is relative. The last time I referred to Vijayawada as small, the listener broke into a sarcastic laugh. An accomplished bureaucrat who retired as Chief Secretary, he must have felt that I was being snobbish. I can’t blame him much. Even my batchmate in the IAS, who is posted in Eluru, protested instantly at my judgment of urban sizes.

It is characteristic of my service that we don’t begin with places like Rampachodavaram. Atleast not till the Government thinks of taxing collection of honey and sale of wild jackfruits. And that, considering the reluctance to bring agriculture in the ambit of taxes, seems very remote. So for IRS, where a lot of our colleagues start their careers at places like Mumbai and Delhi, Vijayawada is a small place.

So what is it that makes small places charming? It is the people. The day I was to reach here, my train was scheduled to arrive here at 4:45 in the morning. I called the office the previous day and asked if they could send someone to the railway station as I was new to the place and was arriving at an odd hour. In about an hour’s time, I got a call from the driver. I asked him to be at the station by 4:30 in the morning. He said he would be at 4 am. And he was. It was just the beginning. It is ten days since I came here. And I have never come across anyone who thinks twice when you ask him for something. People here respect you to the point of embarrassment.

One reason could be because officers of my rank are few. There are five officers of the rank Assistant / Deputy Commissioners in Vijayawada. The corresponding number in Hyderabad is more than 50. Other could be historical. During my interaction with a senior officer, who hails from this place, I was told the behavior of people towards Government officials is result of the colonial history. Since the region, unlike Hyderabad, was under the colonial rule, the people are well-acquainted with administrative machinery and are more conscious of the power, potential and the reach of Government. This is something which would be put to test soon. How?

My jurisdiction consists mainly of old parts of the city and adjoining rural areas. The economic growth is not very vibrant in these parts. But that doesn’t grant me immunity from upward revision of revenue targets. My predecessor felt that collections have reached optimum levels and are likely to plateau. The only way to increase collection was to widen the tax net. So I have sent about 400 letters to assesses, who were not filing returns to do so. Non-filing of Income-tax returns when you have a taxable income or when you belong to particular class of assesses like companies could lead to imprisonment. The response to these letters would reveal whether the people here are truly respectful of the authority of Government.

Personally what I like the most about small cities is their contribution on the professional front. You get to deal with all types of cases. In big cities, there is an element of specialization in the jurisdiction. Some charges deal with only salary cases, some with business cases and others with companies. However, in small cities, the jurisdiction is territorial. So one gets to deal all kinds of cases and consequently the experience is more varied. Secondly, the workload is relatively more manageable. Not that every colleague of mine in the metros are getting buried under the piles of files, but a few of them do have quite a Herculean task ahead of them. And for me, after two years of slumber at Mussoorie and Nagpur, keeping myself awake when sun is still high is in itself a Herculean task.

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Autobiography of an Another Yogi

Today, I woke up very very early. At 7:10 am. Thanks to the kind-hearted soul who banged my door as he ran to the sports complex for the morning Yoga. In a jiffy I ripped off my shirt, the one in which I dozed off last night watching a movie, and groped for my t-shirt in the darkness. It was there exactly where it was 56 days ago, under the pile unread newspapers, scissors, a DVD which I rented three weeks ago, the charger of my phone which I dumped two weeks ago and ear phones of my present phone. Despite the risk of being late, I took a moment to feel proud about how systematic, orderly and organized I am. Not a single molecule moves from its preordained position. Time seems to have no effect on them. I smiled. It feels good to start the day on a positive note.

I stepped out and observed a sea of OTs dressed in the dark blue academy jackets. It reminded me of The Matrix. I was the only one without a jacket. It then occurred to me that it was cold. I cursed the vagaries of weather due to man-induced changes in the environment. How on earth should I know that it would be so cold in the morning? The last time I went to Yoga, the temperature was 15 degrees higher, a little humid and the sky was cloudy. I never realized that such huge difference existed between the mornings of monsoon and winter.

When I reached the sports complex, I had same effect on my friends which George Bush wanted on Iraq, shock and awe. Depending on their respective academic, social and religious indoctrinations, analysis and conclusions ranging from End of History to End of the World emerged. I sheepishly smiled and wished them thinking it would divert their gaze. It ended up as an exercise in futility.

I entered the Yoga room. The mats were new. May be they were bought to cater to the new batch of probationers who arrived last week. Amidst the melee of probationers spreading their mats and settling down, the Yoga instructor sighted me. He adjusted his glasses and looked if it was really me. On confirmation, he had the same look on his face which a bollywood father has in the climax when he meets his son lost in the opening reels of the film.

As the count began for the asanas, a tinge of nostalgia stuck me. It was just as if yesterday was the first day I missed my morning Yoga class. Time is such a deceiving devil, I mused. It flies faster than we think. As I returned to my room after Yoga, I found the maid in-charge of my floor cleaning one of my friend’s room. I asked her to come to my room after she is done with the room. She quizzically asked on which floor my room was. With utmost honesty, I replied that I stayed on the same floor. “Oh”, she remarked as if something from her long-term memory suddenly got retrieved. “Room number 21”, I said to avoid further embarrassment. She had a derisive smile in which I could read, “That room which never opens even after a hundred knocks.”

She promptly came. She too was surprised that things did not change one bit since she last visited. As she cleaned, the bearer got the morning tea. I extended my mug. He raised his eyebrows with remark which only I could hear, “So, you too have your morning tea?” I proudly smiled saying to myself, “Yes, I do.” Once, I finished my tea, the laundry guy came to my floor. When he saw me standing with cloths, he almost dropped the pressed clothes he was carrying. I remember him knocking my door every alternate day asking if there were any clothes to be pressed. I involuntarily shout from my blanket that I had none. One day, despite my repeated shouting he continued to knock my door. I furiously opened to give him a dressing down. But before I could burst out, he pleaded “Sir, please take back your pressed clothes. I am trying to give them back since a week but you refuse to open the door.” As usual, I got away with my trademark sheepish smile.

I was happy that I could do a lot of tasks that were pending. But what was more satisfying is that my presence at the early morning Yoga has motivated my friends to think and dream big. VV, who previously worked for railways, now believes that trains running at 500 km/hr would be a reality in the next six months. MJ, a doctor, thinks that next year we could have an oral vaccine that would protect us from both cancer and AIDS. NN, who hails from Bangalore, is confident that next time he visits home, he can reach M.G.Road from airport in 20 minutes. Today, they have realized that “I have a dream” and “Audacity of hope” are not mere dramatic phrases. If they could spot me at the early morning Yoga, they can even expect their day dreams to come true.

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The Spotlight is on me !!!

Kuffir wanted to know why I joined the Civil Services, a very very personal question. And I told him the secret.

Thanks Kuffir, for the invitation to write for Blogbharti.

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