Those 90 minutes

 

Another football world cup is upon us and I cast my mind back to my own interfaces with the beautiful game. 

The origin of the game seems to be pretty gory. This was essentially a celebratory sport. According to legend, the first time this sport was played in Britain was after the defeat of a Danish prince. After decapitating the prince, they decided to kick his head around. Thereafter, victories in wars tended to be celebrated by kicking the severed heads of the vanquished. Even the half time in football was the result of a conflict. In the early days of the sport, some teams would just pick up the ball and run around like mad, while others considered it cheating. To make it fair, teams decided to divide the games into two halves, playing by the rules of one team during the first half and then switching to the rules of the other team in the second half. That changeover became the half-time break later.

 

The first time I saw the passion surrounding football was when I was hosted by a college batchmate at Igatpuri, a small hamlet in Maharashtra. My batchmate was a Bengali. At the lunch table an argument started between him and his sister over the merits and demerits of their supported teams, Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, respectively. Soon the rest of the family joined in. They had a number of outstation visitors staying in. The entire crowd was sharply divided and the arguments were long and hard and passionate. I was tired after the journey and slept off early in the evening. When I got up briefly at 2 AM, I found that the arguments were still going on!

 

Football hit all of India with a bang when the World Cup was first televised live in the country in 1986. This was also the world cup where a short, stocky chap called Maradona unveiled himself on the world stage. That was the year I was appearing for my UPSC exams. When I applied for it, I was in Bombay and I had chosen that city for my Preliminary exam centre. By the time the exam came around, I was transferred to Delhi in my organisation. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the Preliminary exam centre shifted to Delhi so I travelled to Bombay by the Rajdhani express AC chair car which was considered a huge luxury those days but meant a sleepless night. There was an important World Cup match so my friends and I all sat up till early hours of the morning watching that match and then dissecting it threadbare. I appeared for the UPSC prelims after two straight sleepless nights. It was a miracle that I got through.

 

For officers in Calcutta Police, a disproportionately large amount of time goes towards what is called “Holla duty,” basically duty on the streets tackling law and order situations. These duties are strenuous and many times get hairy also. Out of all the “holla duties,” the duty at the Maidan football grounds was considered the toughest. Each of the three big clubs in Calcutta, i.e., Mohun Bagan, East Bengal and Mohammedan has its own designated club-cum-football ground and the league matches are played on those grounds. The crowd is as partisan as you can get and for some reason, they believe that their team cannot lose in their home turf. If their team even looks like losing a match there, what they threaten to do to the referee and the players and almost succeed cannot be printed here. This is where we come in and try our best to see that there is no blood-letting. In one such match, one elderly gentleman, apart from shouting raucously, was throwing earthen teacups, stones and whatever he could lay his hands on at the players and the referee. I walked up to him and asked him why he was so agitated; it was just a match. He said, “Matcher por apni to soja chale jaben aapnaar badite, bou bachcha kachhe; era here gele aami to aamar pada te dhuktei parbona. Ami cha na khie bhaat na khie eder ke taka di, dekhen ki khelchhe!” [After the match, you’ll happily go home to your wife and kids; if these guys lose, I can’t even enter my colony. I save pennies and pounds from my tea and meals so as to give contribution to this team and the club and see how they are playing!]

 

When I went to Mozambique in 1994 on a UN assignment, the football world cup was being held in the USA. In our duty station, Pemba, there was a large contingent of officers from Brazil. They and all the other officers were supporting Brazil and for every match involving Brazil, there was huge betting, cheers and booze. Brazil made it to the final and all of us UN personnel descended on the local disco for a special watch. One officer had collected money from all and had arranged a TV and a connection. The commentary was in Portugese in that particular channel. Having always been a bit of a contrarian, I, along with a colleague from BSF, decided to support Italy just because everyone else was supporting Brazil. Since it was too crowded, we could barely make out the game and kept cheering when it looked like “our” team, Italy was getting the better of “their” team, Brazil. The match was a goalless draw at the scheduled close and went into a penalty shoot-out. In the penalty shoot-out, Italy won 3-2 and we cheered lustily. However, we found that the rest of the crowd was also cheering loudly. What had happened was, watching it from a great distance, we had mistaken the Brazil team for Italy and were cheering for the “wrong” team.

 

Another UN assignment at Sierra Leone. I was a Police Advisor to Sierra Leone Police and was trying to arrange some funds from UNDP for training the local Police in modern traffic management. When I met the concerned officer in UNDP who was from Cameroon, I didn’t get anywhere. All my pleadings for the funds went in vain and he explained how under the extant rules, my project couldn’t be accommodated in their funding schemes. However, just as I was leaving, crestfallen, I congratulated him on the Cameroon football team of 1990 world cup where two of their players were red-carded in the first match but, playing with only 9 men thereafter, went on to reach the quarter finals. He was so thrilled that he made me sit down, trawled through the rules, did an about turn and sanctioned even more than I was asking for.

 

My worst football related experience came when an organization I was with was mandated to host the B.N. Mullik police football championship in Calcutta. There is a get-together on the evening before the final when the local senior officers are invited. I was the local Commandant and most of the arrangement tasks fell on my shoulders. In the lead-up to it, I had suggested that we should invite the lady wives but my seniors said that the budget wouldn’t permit high numbers. Even though I suggested limiting the invitees to very high ranks but inviting the lady wives, it was turned down. However, a senior dignitary flew in from Delhi with his wife and insisted that the lady wives be invited. I suggested sending out a fresh set of invitation cards addressed to “Mrs and Mr” but my seniors directed me to ring up each senior officer individually and convey the invitation. It was going okay until I called up one of the Director General rank officers:

 

“Good morning, Sir, I’m B.B. Dash, Commandant, …”

“Good morning.”

 

“Sir, we’re hosting the B.N. Mullik football championship this year. I was calling up to invite for the get-together on … evening.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve received the card. I’ll be attending.”

 

“Sir, we shall be grateful if Madam could kindly join us.”

“She passed away 10 years back.” Click, Bang!

Naram garam

 

In the Police, some people are MBAs, the real thing, i.e., Masters of Business Administration, not the Married But Available types. Since popular wisdom is that for civil servants, life begins on the day one joins the service, some of these are born MBAs (i.e., already MBAs when they join), some attain MBAhood (they go for a mid-career course to “improve” their skill-set) and some have MBAhood thrust upon them (they resort to a study programme to tide over some inconvenient chapter in their careers while retaining the government quarters and perks). I happened to belong to the first category but soon realised how an MBA programme truly ill-equips you for a career in Policing. 

Almost at the beginning of the MBA course the teachers tell us about the virtues of being Y type managers and how vile the X type managers are. Essentially, Type X Managers believe that employees need to be coerced, controlled and micro-managed with the threat of punishment to ensure that adequate effort is put towards achieving the business’ goals. Type Y Managers believe that employees being motivated at work is innate. People will accept, and even seek, taking on responsibility under the right conditions. So, one should be nice to one’s staff and believe in them. So I behaved as though any subordinate was a brother from another mother and used to address them as “Dada.” One day, a Sub Inspector fair shouted at me telling me to stop this nonsense. He said all those fancy stuff is for the books. In a uniformed service, I was destroying the whole hierarchy and discipline. That was sabak no. 1.

 

I thought I was a public servant, the public was my client and client was God. As a part of training, when I was assigned to do vehicle checking, I applied the Y theory and was gently waving at trucks to stop so that I could check their papers. All the trucks were just zooming past when my trainer Sub Inspector shouted, “Kya kar rahen hain Dash saab, aise koi rukega kya! Ek ko do danda lagaiye, sab apne aap rukenge. And he proceeded to put his words to action and was immediately and phenomenally effective. So, that was the end of X type and Y type for me.

 

Then, there was this beautiful concept of MBO, Management By Objectives. One was supposed to set the targets jointly with the subordinates so that their involvement and buy-in would be greater. However, when I tried it, all that happened was abysmally low targets and one thousand and one excuses. Meanwhile, my boss held one Crime Conference, suspended a few laggards and transferred a few others and everything fell in place. Thus ended my flirtation with that theory.

 

However, one theory did seem to apply – with some modifications. I found that officers do follow some sort of Maslow’s hierarchy in their evolution in the career.

 

I don’t think, when he joins the service, any officer is already evil personified. In fact, almost all the officers, when they join, are fired with idealism to change the world and leave the society a better place. So, the initial stage of the officer can be characterised as, “I shall do no wrong; I shall also not let anyone do anything wrong.” ISDNW, ISANLADAW. Wherever the officer sees any wrongdoing, he tends to jump in like a greyhound dog and tear at it, sometimes at great cost to himself.

As time goes by, the officer finds that the system is just too big and too daunting and he is just ending up tilting at windmills and getting bloody and bruised without a scintilla of difference to the environment. Then maturity starts seeping in. Now, he modifies the paradigm to, “Okay, I shall do nothing wrong; let others do what they want to.” ISDNW, LODWTWT.

A little later, a little more maturity. What happens is, the officer finds that as he is sticking to his principles, or whatever is left of it, the world has been moving on. His no-longer-dear colleagues who trod a different path have been going from plum posting to plum posting while he has been rotting in the backwaters with unheard-of, un-remembered, un-sung, barely-there assignments like Rules & Manuals, Vehicle Licensing, and so on. Now the questioning starts and he asks, “What is right and what is wrong?” WIRAWIW?

This question leads, with an elegant inevitability, to the fourth phase and the GREAT REALISATION, “No, what was earlier right was actually wrong; what was wrong was actually right.” WWERWAW, WWWWAR.

While the fourth phase comes with certain (may be a lot of) benefits, internally, the officer is never at an easy place. As time goes by and he goes further and further down that slippery slope, he also becomes more and more aware of the price and futility of it all. Finally, corresponding to the self-actualisation acme of Maslow, he attains the pinnacle of “DO NOTHING!” and retires. DN!

 

This is too complicated, really. A colleague once put it more succinctly: 

“Pehle pehle sahab log garam rehta hai; kuchh din ke baad naram hota hai; aur, akhir mein … besharam ho jaata hai.”

Fathers and sons

 

As Superintendent of Police of a district, I was sitting in my office late one day when a young boy sought to see me. I invited him in. He would’ve been about 20 but huge, walked in and talked with impressive confidence and poise.

He said he was fighting against injustice wherever he saw it and had major success. The Police lines in the district had a national flag in front of it. The constables staying in the barracks, on their own, used to enforce an unwritten rule of anyone passing by to get down from bicycles, etc. and walk and pay obeisance to the flag. This boy apparently had filed a case in the Calcutta High Court and managed to stop such (in his opinion, “abominable” and) illegal practice. I was a little intrigued that a young boy of 20 would be spending so much time, energy and money pursuing these matters rather than concentrating on studies and things I felt would be more natural pursuits at that age. However, after a few platitudes, he left.

 

A few days later, the businessmen’s association in the town visited me in a delegation to complain about extreme extortion by the same young boy. The extortion had been going on for years but that particular year, it had scaled such heights that they were at the end of their tether.

 

This was a revelation and I enquired closely into what was which. What I found was a devastating, and not a little tragic, tale of what not to do as a parent.

 

This boy apparently used to arrange for certain public (sarbojonin) Pujas including Durga Puja in his house complex. On this pretext, he used to practically threaten all shopkeepers and businessmen to part with huge sums. There was a sub-text to his meeting me. While the meeting was one-on-one where only platitudes were exchanged, he had gone out claiming how close he was to SP saheb who was content merely to be guided by his advice and counsel for everything that the SP saheb did or didn’t do. And so on and so forth. The general public had seen him going into my office and spending a fairly good amount of time there. They had no way of knowing that it was merely a stray button upon which he had sewn a whole diabolical vest. Some of them had already parted with huge sums.

 

I was worked up enough to delve into how a young boy had become such a Frankenstein. Nothing had prepared me for the tale of systematic derangement that had gone into its making. His father was a Deputy Magistrate and used to be very indulgent towards the son. Things must have started small but had got to a point where every month, on the first, when the father would return home with the salary (used to be cash salary then), the son would lock him up in his room and not release him until he passed out the bulk of the salary to the son under the door. The utensils he used to eat from were all made of silver. The boy also wore 10 expensive rings, some of them presumably to ward off any evil eye. This state of things had not come to pass overnight.

 

In the initial days of the boy’s deviant tendencies, the Principal of his school (in another district) had sent a letter to the boy’s father inviting him for a discussion regarding the unruly conduct of his son. When anyone’s kids are in school, the merest hint of any such letter sends parents into a tizzy and preparations for reparations, abject apologies, downloading on the kid/s and so on. Rather than going to meet the Principal with any modicum of apology, what this father did was to move the High Court against that polite letter. I guess, foreseeing unnecessary runs around courts, the school must have dropped the matter. The boy went on to be involved in the rape of a classmate but the father managed to suppress that and got himself transferred to the current district and the boy shifted to a school there.

 

I asked my officers why this chap’s extortion and other depredations had been allowed to go on with impunity for so long. They all said that every time the Police Station tried to intervene, the father, being a Deputy Magistrate, would move heaven and earth and see that the Police officer, rather than the boy, faced trouble. I also asked them why they were giving permission for the public Pujas. Turned out that the Pujas were all held without permission but no one dared to do anything about it. The reason – the Deputy Magistrate father, again. Plus, in Bengal, there is a lot of sentiment attached to Pujas, Durga Puja in particular. The boy had been detained a few times, only to have been forcibly released within minutes.

 

At that time, the Durga Puja was a few days away and the boy had put up the pandal. On a Friday, I told the officers to dismantle the pandal structure and arrest him. I talked to the District Magistrate, told him the whole story and requested him not to entertain any extraneous request in this regard. As expected, the father went on an overdrive but got nowhere. Also, Saturdays and Sundays are public holidays and the Courts function with only skeletal arrangements so he couldn’t arrange instant bail. The boy finally managed bail after a full five days. However, one of the lesser known facts about prisons is that there is a strict hierarchy in the prisons amongst the criminals. Any newcomer is systematically “welcomed” and baptised until he falls in line. Seeing this boy’s rowdy bearing and nature, it must have been baptism by fire.

 

The long and short of it is that, he came out after those five days a completely different person. The town was rid of a long-standing menace for good.

 

Love is blind. Paternal love can be blind-er.

Dial-a-cop

 

The biggest high of post-retirement life has been escaping the tyranny of the telephone. This piece is about that tyranny. In Police, the requirement of the job is such that the officers need to be contacted without any loss of time – crime and law & order issues don’t wait for the officer’s convenience and need to be attended to urgently. So much so that one could not afford to be away from a telephone for any length of time. In Calcutta Police, during pre-cellphone days, Deputy Commissioners needed to inform the Control Room their location and possible means of contact whenever they went out anywhere on off-duty hours or even on holidays. Once I was watching a film with family and they flashed a slide on the screen asking me to rush to the control room immediately. 

I had just joined Calcutta Police when Mother Teresa passed away. This was a very solemn world-event and many Heads of State or their representatives came to Calcutta to pay their last respects. Just a week before that, Princess Diana had died in a car crash and the world saw an outpouring of grief on television where swarms of people went to royal residences to lay reportedly 60 million flowers at the gates. This and the presence of international media led to seriously huge crowds (bigger than it would otherwise have been) at and around Park Street, Calcutta off which a building was chosen for lying-in-state for Mother Teresa. My days were divided between standing at Park Street trying to manage the unmanageable crowds and Calcutta Police Control Room which was manned by senior officers round-the-clock during the period. The control room duty tends to be boring but does have its moments. I picked up the phone ringing at around 8 PM and the following ensued:

 

Me: Hello.

Voice: Bill Clinton bolchhi. [This is Bill Clinton.]

 

Me: Bolun Clinton Moshai. [Kindly tell me, Sir Clinton.]

Voice: Mother Teresa maara gechhen. [Mother Teresa is dead.]

 

Me: Hain, khubi dukkher byapar. [Yes, it’s very sad.]

Voice: Aapnaader Police arrangement sab theek achhe toh? [Your Police arrangements are all right, I hope.]

 

Me: Hain, sab theek, kintu aapni kena jaante chaichhen? [Yes, everything is in place but why do you want to know?]

Voice: Hillary (Clinton) jaachhe toh, ei jonno aami worried chhilam. [Hilary is going there (to represent me) so I was worried.

 

Me: Sir, addo chinta korben naa sab first class aachhe. Ekta proshno chhilo. [Sir, please don’t worry at all, everything is first class. I had one question, if I may.]

Voice: Bolun. [Tell me.]

 

Me: Clinton saheb, aapni banglaa bolchhen! [Clinton saheb, you’re speaking Bengali!]

Voice: Hain. Emni toh aami ingrezi boli; bouta jaachhe toh, ei jonno Bangla shikhe nilam. [Yes. I usually speak English; the wife is going there so decided to learn Bengali.]

 

Another time, another phone call.

 

When I was Sub Divisional Police Officer (SDPO), the town saw a monkey menace for a while. The monkey had gone insane and used to attack people without provocation. I thought it didn’t concern me or my department but Police, while being criticised for a lot of things, does get looked up to as the saviour of the last resort. One day, I received a phone call from the local MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly):

 

MLA: Dash saheb, namaskar. [Dash saheb, greetings.]

Me: Namaskar, Kemon aachhen? [Greetings, how are you?]

 

MLA: Aami bhalo achhi kintu ei town e ekta bodo samasya dekha diyechhe. [I’m fine but there is a huge menace in town now.]

Me: Bolun. [Please tell me.]

 

MLA: Ei ekta baanar koth theke ese sabair jeebon tosnos kare diyechhe. Sabai ke dekhe taada korchhe. Aami MLA, aamake o taada korchhe! Kichhu korun. [This one monkey has appeared from somewhere and has made life miserable for everybody. It’s chasing everyone on sight. I’m an MLA and it’s chasing even me! Please do something.]

 

When one is an SDPO or SDO, one is essentially starting one’s career in the Civil Service and certain high authorities (HAs) represent God or higher. When  an HA visited a sub division, the SDO and SDPO would run around like headless chicken, attending to every small thing, official and demi-official, so that the visit passed off without a hitch. A particular HA decided to pay a visit to the sub division where I was SDPO just before his retirement, it being a scenic place and a remote one. He was a very simple person with austere habits and very fatherly so the SDO and I didn’t have much problems However, late in the afternoon, I received a call from the SDO:

 

“HA has desired to see “The Gods Must be Crazy Part II” in the evening. I’ve exhausted all my resources and contacts but can’t find the movie for love or for money. Could you do something?”

 

Every whim of HA was our command. These were pre-computer, video cassette player days. In that small place, no one watched English movies except movies of a particular hue which were euphemistically called “English” movies. No one there would have heard of a movie called “The Gods Must be Crazy Part I” even, let alone its sequel. However, I put my SHOs (Station House Officers) on the job and they searched high and low. Finally, one enterprising SHO found the movie across the border in Bhutan and I proudly sent it over to the SDO.

 

The next morning, I visited the Guest House where the HA was staying, all puffed up with a sense of having achieved the impossible and saved the sub division from hell and damnation. I saw the SDO patrolling agitatedly at the gate. To my anxious query, he replied that everything was ruined and he didn’t know how it was all going to pan out. Apparently, although the cover of the video cassette said, “The Gods Must be Crazy Part II,” inside, it was the same old, same old, i.e., what passed euphemistically as “English” movies in that sub division. Suddenly I remembered a very important (albeit non-existent) engagement elsewhere in the sub division and rushed off. Dunno why, but my relation with the SDO was never the same again.