“One of the joys of the English language is that it can occasionally capture the earthy essence of a subject with the flair of a Lalu Yadav. Take for example, the saying, “all mouth and no trousers”, an idiom used to describe a blowhard unable to back up his boasts with actions in the, er, chuddie department. This pithy phrase was used by Northern Englishwomen as a sharp-tongued and effective putdown of pushy, over-confident men. Ouch. It is an appealing metaphor and one that could well be applied to the President of the Land of the Brave and Not so Free. There stands a man who is both boastful and wears flashy trousers, but why beat your head on a wall that's never going to be built? AMANT: someone who talks the talk but is unable to walk the walk, which may well have been the inspiration for the babu who coined the Emergency-era slogan, “Talk less, Work More.”
It is easier to fall into the trap of ridiculing a loudmouth halfway across the globe than to catalogue our own failings. As we speak, millions of Indians are sitting in committees, panchayats and think-tanks engaged in solemn, almost pious debate on the various ills that beset our land. If we had a dollar for every bright idea and Eureka moment that sprang from these discussions we could have paid for Trump's wall, forget the Mexicans. We are brilliant at brainstorming but quite hopeless when it comes to implementation.
Partly this is due to a lack of focus and partly to the legacy of centralised planning. Five-year plans and the dreaded Commission which spawned them may have been consigned to the dustbin of history but the mindset and culture that venerated them is still alive. This is precisely why change in India, especially for the good, proceeds at a glacial pace. By disbanding central planning but leaving in place the IAS, very little useful purpose was served. But don't take my word for it. Listen to former Cabinet Secretary, Nirmal Mukarji's keynote address at the 50th IAS anniversary: "Separate central, state and local bureaucracies should eventually replace the IAS as an aid to efficiency. Without such reform, the service will be unable to move from a command and control strategy to a more interactive, interdependent system. This is because candidates, if not placed in the insider vacancy of their home states, are whimsically allotted to different states in alphabetic order. If in a particular year the roster begins from 'A', the first candidate will go to the Andhra Pradesh cadre, the next one to Bihar, and subsequently to Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and so on." I swear I am not making this up: maybe the babu who devised the system spent his formative years reading Kafka.
Equally bizarre is the training programme at Mussorie which includes horse-riding, weapons training, first aid and a complex "normative" vocabulary. Horsing around with guns and band-aid solutions, as the English who bequeathed us the service may have said and for normative, substitute the word jargon. Most babus positively quiver with delight when they read memos containing words like inasmuch, nevertheless, your good self and so on. Which brings me back to my central point: tragically those tasked with framing the national agenda are devoted to style, not substance and that is precisely why we are destined to remain a nation of talkers, not doers.”
