The question that is being asked of me by
many of my well wishers, friends and admirers is how do I feel, now that I have
retired. Well, to be honest serving for close to four decades in one of the
most coveted services of the country has many disadvantages. You tend to forget
the use of your limbs. There is someone connecting and picking up the phone for
you, you are driven around, your engagements, your tour, and your other quotidian
worries- from filing tax return to paying your utility bills- are someone
else’s concern. In higher echelons of the government someone even thinks your
thought for you. You just have to be!
After
you retire all that elaborate support system, all those rites of pride and
protocol disappear. It is like someone who does not how to swim is thrown in a
pool without a lifebelt. Or you are left to navigate in a totally unfamiliar
city. Many of us tend to show unmistakable withdrawal symptoms. Jostling for
paying electricity bills, or booking a railway ticket (if you are not into net
transaction) doing things as others not so spoilt do, can make you maladjusted
for a while. I was warned – not that I could not see it for myself –but I had
some more worries.
To add to the standard quota of
uncertainties of a retiring officer, I have been trying to renovate my house to
make it livable. It was empty for quite some time. It is no point trying to
explain the hazards and the frustration of such an activity to someone who has
not undertaken such an expedition himself. There are so many liars, thugs and
swindlers in this line of business that it can easily turn you into a misanthrope.
All in all, my prospect in the near future looked like a perfectly scripted
plot for a black, neurotic drama! Anticlimactically, it is my date of retirement
that kept me buoyed up, gave me hope and sustenance. And when it actually came
it was such a relief! All the uncertainties did stare me in the face as it does
any one of us. The prospect of my house becoming livable had receded a few more
weeks into the future. But hell is a relative habitation. The comfort zone that
I seem to have left behind was no comfort for me given that so many knives were
out for me and danger seemed to be lurking at every corner.
So
much has happened in the dying years of my service, so many distressing things-vilification,
show cause, disciplinary proceeding, supersession, a complaint case and much
more- that they remind me of
Lenin’s famous remark about politics, “There are decades when nothing happens;
and there are weeks when decades happen." It was only God’s infinite grace
that I survived several attempts to frame me up in order to harm me in my
career and ruin my reputation. I have never considered the denial of
opportunities, postings, medals, etc as acts of disfavour because the
government giveth and the government taketh away. (For the record, I was overlooked
for the post of DGP on four occasions and I have retired in a lower grade of
pay than officers four years my junior. I never even made a grievance of it.) But
my reputation is not a matter of an executive fiat, or a government
notification; it has been hard earned and paid for in hard currency of an
unwavering faith in the values of probity in public life. The worst thing is
that on every occasion personal malice was dressed up as considered government
decision. Since an officer cannot challenge every order
in a court of law, the government can play havoc with his life and career. I
felt like the French philosopher who spoke during disturbingly
unsettled times in France,
“If today I
were to be accused of having stolen the Church of Notre Dame I would have no
option but to run away from France.”
Now that I am past the hump all these precious years of my life which vaguely
leaked away in worries and anxieties seem but like a transient twitch. I am in
a celebratory mood reveling in my migration from the ranks of Helots – Helots
were a class of people halfway between slaves and citizens in ancient Sparta-to
that of an independent citizen. This freedom is worth years of the lives of any
number of tongue tied, terrorized and fear stricken civil servants. Like any
liberated serf I am going to exploit to the utmost my freedom to speak my mind.
Earlier on my conversations with the government were subject to conduct rules,
elaborate courtesy, and the unbreakable code of never mentioning facts that
could bring disrepute to the government however disreputable its conduct. Never
to speak truth to power except in such a term that the unpalatable truth became
an error of your own judgment. (I violated that rule on several occasions and
paid the price for it. So we are quits!) In fact, when I was addressing the
Home guards who had lined up for inspection on the eve of my farewell parade on the 30th of
June at Bihta I kept concentrating hard so that I did not shout from the podium
itself : azadi , azadi azadi. Decades of conditioning,
however, was a surer guarantee and my uniformed self behaved exactly as it was
supposed to.
