“Britain has invented a new missile. It’s called the civil servant — it doesn’t work and it can’t be fired”
Once quipped General Sir Walter Walker, a British general.
A well-known verse in Urdu goes: Jo log kuchh nahin kartay kamal kartay hain, which can roughly be translated as those who do nothing, do it wonderfully well.
Though the poet was not referring to the bureaucracy, the general impression is that civil servants, or babus, a colonial tradition handed down by the British, do nothing — and they do it wonderfully well. And if they do any work at all, it is not without a vested interest. They may not have a solution for every problem but they do have a problem for every solution. At times they have to try very hard to create problems for which they have already found solutions. At least that is the commonly held view about babus and is to some extent shared by a senior babu, Hussain Ahmed Shirazi, in his book Babu Nagar.
The book in essence is an account of the cold and steely world of officialdom and simultaneously pokes fun at the self-important members of bureaucracy and conceited high-ranking officials. Since Shirazi Sahib has had a long career in the civil services, or in other words has been a big babu himself, his narrative must be taken as materialising from the proverbial horse’s mouth.
The word babu has different definitions. A babu means a “prince, noble, man of family or distinction; a title of respect (as) Sir, Mr, Esqre. [Esquire]; young master; father; a term of endearment applied to children; a clerk or writer in an office,” says John T Platts in his renowned lexicon A dictionary of Urdu, classical Hindi and English. But Shirazi Sahib does not fit into any of the definition mentioned above and comes across as essentially a literary personality. This is perhaps one of the reasons why he could not become a part of the system. He has spent 33 long years in the bureaucracy and knows it inside out. The result of this long-drawn love-hate relationship is this book that at times it makes one wonder how this bloated system keeps functioning.
The book can be divided into two sections. The first one consists of satirical and humorous essays and the second part are kind of memoirs written in a lighter vein in which every piece has a running heading of Babu Nagar. These pieces of writing discuss in a lively and tongue-in-cheek manner the bureaucracy, its history, its background, its ways, survival tactics for a civil servant, delaying techniques, strategy for promoting self and mutual interests, planning and working (or lack of it), hypocrisy, sycophancy and corruption. He has missed nothing in his book and even includes the most dreaded part of a bureaucrat’s life — retirement and life after it. Replete with personal anecdotes, the book discloses many secrets under the thin garb of allusions and puns. For example, he admits that though the bureaucracy loves the English language, at best babu English can be dubbed as “poor”. According to him, one time the government of the day short listed 40 government officers for training them abroad and made them appear in the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOFEL), only eight could get through.
But Shirazi Sahib opines there are many kinds of babus, as by babu he refers to anyone who takes undue advantage of his position and power and does not mind breaching rules and disregarding moral values for his personal gains. The different kinds of babus that he has mentioned include political babus, babus in khaki, business babus, judicial babus, religious babus, medical babus, literary babus, media babus, artist babus and even lady babus. In other words, almost everyone in our society is exploiting someone.
With his sharp wit and a piercing eye, Shirazi Sahib specifically aims at the ills that have crippled our society. Another commendable aspect of the book, which is becoming rarer by the day, is its elegant Urdu prose coupled with pertinent usage of Urdu and Persian couplets.
Overall Babu Nagar makes for an engrossing read, except for sections where the writer becomes a bit didactic. The book, published by Lahore’s Sang-e-Meel Publications that has become known for publishing high-priced books (or rather setting the price of books quite high), has a price tag of Rs995, something that only babus can afford. But the publishers perhaps do not know that babus don’t read and those who do read are not babus and many of them cannot afford the book.
drraufparekh@yahoo.com