From the Facebook page of an ex Goanetter, a journalist, wit and a Keralite.
As the Kerala CM launches the 'Files Disposal Mission', I share here an old FB post: Bal Gangadhar Tilak famously mocked the Indian Civil Service as “Neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service.” Lord Samuel wittily lauded the British bureaucracy’s faultless ability to “provide a difficulty to every solution.” Soon after becoming prime minister, Margaret Thatcher thought she should make an informed assessment of the civil servants for herself. In May 1980, she invited 23 permanent secretaries in her government to dinner at 10 Downing Street. She groaned afterwards: “This was one of the most dismal occasions of my entire time in government.” A report on the Indian bureaucracy by a US think tank concluded that “corrupt bureaucrats are despised but thrive; the honest are respected but do not rise, and idealists end up nowhere.” Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible, impossible. Roland. Toronto.
