Chivalry was long dead but now it appears basic courtesy is also comatose soon to join the realm of the extinct. Our office hours are 9-12 for accepting papers which are processed and returned at 2 pm. Falling prey to the lethal disease of ‘serving the people’ we were stupid enough to come super early to office working beyond our normal speed leaving aside the coffee/tea break and even working through lunch to extend the time right till 3 pm. One would have supposed that it would have garnered some small bit of credit, a polite thank you in recognition of the improvement would have been welcome but instead what we got for our trouble was the following incident which did nothing but leave a very very bitter taste in my mouth I cringe to remember even now.

At 259 pm this bulky guy shows up at the window and hurls a question about the time for acceptance of papers. Since the staff was not in the room I told him our time adding that office time should be followed strictly and THAT was all the stimulus he apparently needed to unleash his very vocal volley of epitaphs interspersed with some pretty colorful Punjabi phrases about how he hadn’t asked for crap and how our salaries were paid from his tax. Attempts at requests to him to lower his voice and speak in a civil remotely rational manner fell on deaf ears till he made a grand exit all in his own sweet time leaving me to wonder where the golden days of beaurocracy had gone when the officers were ‘sahab’. While I don’t advocate the ‘supposed’ slavery of the earlier days I do miss the times when lines of authority were clear and people behaved with more civility. I see messy shades of nothing but grey where all lines have disappeared leaving us to sink in the caveman age where the more vocal shouter wins all.

Lesson of the day : being nice to people is fine in societies where people are educated enough to respond in kind, try humility in the land of the pure and all you will get is an earful of abuse (if you are lucky) and more action (if you are not!)