Dreams of the machine: the creative lives of the bureaucracy
Abstract landscape, Kiran Soni, IAS officer
A few months ago I was wandering around the Himalayas to research a story when I came upon a slender book of poems written by a Sikkimese bureaucrat, Tashi Chophel. Here’s one from his collection:
How to Collect a Folktale
Always start the journey
By a river crossing
Or treading gingerly across a major landslide
It gives the feeling of an epic quest…Never show your weariness
Walk at your own measured pace
The journey to the blue hill is long
But do rest on an errant breeze
Never show your fear
When your feet slip perilously
Or the yak you are riding teeters on the edge
You want their respect, not their ridicule
Never ask for stories directly
Jump at them when they least expect it
See them scratch their heads quizzically
It takes time to adjust the blur from reality —
Chophel’s portrait of a Himalayan Don Quixote riding his yak through the mountains, collecting folktales from drunk villagers suddenly animated the landscape I was traversing:
“The mule trains to Tibet are done
Only soldiers frequent the windswept houses
Seeking forbidden liquor and border gossip
Women a bonus”
he writes, in a poem titled Lhonak. I began to imagine the secret inner life of Indian bureaucrats, officials, and pen-pushers who moonlight as poets, painters and romantics.
by IRS officer Nandini Nair, ‘Untamed,’ watercolour on paper
“We were unaware that the law required anyone to give an explanation for having tea, whether in the morning, noon or night. One might take tea in a variety of ways, not all of them always elegant or delicate, some of them perhaps even noisy. But we know of no way to drink tea ‘suspiciously’."
Throughout his four decade career, Patel has written thousands of pages of legal documents, using them as space to satirise absurdities of the system, critique society and comment on literature. He sometimes compares plaintiffs and appellants to literary characters, or the unlikely events of a case to plots of novels.
His writing, albeit in the form of court documents, resist the grinding monotony of most legal writing.
Instead Patel injects lightness, candour and humour into the courtroom through prose. I’ve seen his judgments passed around giggling groups of junior lawyers for purely aesthetic reasons — countless pages of priceless prose yellowing away in dog-eared legal files yellowing away in the dusty corridors of our courts.
by former IRS officer, Nandini Nair, watercolour on paper
It really made me wonder — how many Indian lawyers and judges started out being kids who just liked novels… and who wrote their literary masterpieces in the form of contracts, judicial filings, judgments? How many of our Nobel laureates are languishing in government offices? Is it possible that the little human parts that make up the faceless machinery of Indian bureaucracy are still contain creative spirits just need tending to?
