RCT's musings

The recent episode of Hardik Pandya and KL Rahul refuses to die down. Every day in the newspapers there is extensive coverage with the most recent one in the Indian Express analysing every word spoken by the duo and the in-depth analysis of what the players behaved like when the controversy broke out. Views of ex-cricketers were also given. Some outright hostile while others more cautious in their words. For both cricketers, the timing could not have been worse. Just a few months before the World Cup during an Australian tour which will be remembered in history as the most successful ever.   As some sniggered, Rahul’s bad timing spilling over from the pitch to life off it! Notwithstanding, his poor form in the test series KL Rahul is a man who holds immense potential for the India’s cricketing future. The same goes for Pandya. This fall from grace for the star cricketers has been triggered by their own acts. In such situations, one does not expect support from the outside ...

The idea of customer centricity in the role of a Deputy Commissioner/ District Collector The District Collector (DC hereafter) can best be defined as the “senior most representative of Government” at the district level – the 600 odd administrative units our country comprises. The institution of the DC is more than 200 years old. Like other institutions, over this period it too has undergone a sea change in the roles and responsibilities associated with it. The key watershed moments in this evolution have been India’s independence, the separation of the judiciary from the executive, the unleashing of market forces post liberalisation reforms, the rights based approach to public delivery and now finally the rise of social media and the internet age.    These changes are important to mention because with each change new stakeholders enter, bringing with them their own expectations from the institution. In other words, the question of who is the de-facto customer and how c...

My take on “Lives of others” and “The house without windows”. It gave me a great sense of accomplishment when I finished “The Silk Roads”. A 600 page Magnus Opus by Peter Frankopan, it was a crash course on the major threads running through history of the world in the last 3000 years. I felt that I was sitting in a time machine seeing the characters who had shaped their times very closely. The author had shown me the picture, telling me all about it without letting me know what he felt about it. He had told the story. The good and the bad were for me to decide. I had been entertained by the book. Yet, upon completion I felt tired. Every page of the book, though lucidly written, had so much trivia that often one had to literally keep the book down and absorb as much of it as possible. I am not that good a sponge, anyway. I needed a break. A break to recuperate and rekindle the fire I have had for historical, non-fiction literature.   In other words, I needed fiction. ...

In the quest for hope - 'Seva' with duty When I was told that I had been posted to Bilaspur as SDM, it was only the impressions I had developed through hearsay that came to my mind. The place was full of aggressive litigation happy people, who were otherwise, I was told quite dry. The weather was bad – too hot for the summers and too cold for the winters. There were massive law and order related problems due to the clashes between management of the newly arrived cement plants and their rowdy truck  unions. However, these were not the issues on which I spent much mind space. The one dominant theme which I was reminded time and again by people around me ( from the boss to my driver) was that in the capacity of the post I has been assigned I was to organise the ShravanAsthmi Fair at Naina Devi Temple.  The temple has a history of tragedies during the Mela. At least twice in the last thirty years there have been massive stampedes in which hundreds had died. Why Naina Dev...