The First Post

Frankly speaking it took a lot of will power to go public with this blog. Not to mention oodles of direct and indirect pressure from fellow officers who have launched their own blogs. I’ve been a reluctant blogger hoping from one blog address to another without exactly being too obvious about them. I guess that stems from a general crabby instinct and the belief that most writing is intrinsically personal and not something that I can put out there.
So this is a conscious decision prompted more or less by long ( and very senseless , pointless, aimless discussions with Rjmpb ( a fellow officer of the Administrative Service and a colleague in Rajasthan. By the acronym you can see that he is seeped in the traditions and tenets of the government, the id means nothing on face value but stands for quite a lot. But more on him the id later.)
Technically the attempt should have been out of Rajasthan, but my first blog post comes out of a trip home. The long journey from Rajasthan ( place of work) to Dehradun ( place of home) was a catalyst in hastening the first post. So although the blog will be posted from Rajasthan mostly, this particular post is from the green valley of Dehradun.
Leave is a rarity in my job so when I managed two days off for Diwali , it seemed quite like a Godsend. The official and reluctant nod of approval came just a day before so reservations on a train were a practical impossibility. Hence the long 12 hour drive home. Back in college driving down from Delhi to Dehradun took around 5 hours. Now despite a short neat 4 lane stretch beyond Meerut, the whole thing takes anything between 7 to 8 hours. Over the last decade or so every tiny village in UP seems to have morphed into a small town . So the narrow state highway to Dehradun becomes a hub for transport , humans, animals and ofcourse during the pre Diwali week a bustling market as well

.
Diwali market at Deoband
A slight hold up thanks to a herd that needed to cross!

It's quite funny sometimes how a job can tweak your whole approach to anything you see around. So even though I 've been on this highway a million times before I've never examined firecracker shops on it and around the small towns with such a critical eye as I 've done this time. In the whole frenezied firecracker license inspections carried out post the Deeg accident in Bharatpur , I could not but examine every shop tiny or otherwise without wondering if it was licensed, unlicensed, had a permanent or temporary license, had enough road space for a fire engine to be rushed in in case of a crisis, stored its own fire extinguishers, built of highly inflammable material or not, and the whole gamut of requirements that need to be addressed before allocating shops.

Not to forget the permanent battle in rural areas with the lack of public transport. Hundreds of people packed like fish into retrofitted local transport that makes you wonder how they move at all.

Thats not all - I found myself getting agitated at posters and bilboards of political leaders which directives from the election commission state are not really permissible. Of course any one who has dealt with the Election Commission is probably aware of it multifactedness and larger than lofe presence. A violation of the Model Code of Conduct is a sin no returning officer who treasures his /her head can afford. By now I guess the entire sensory system of my body is tuned to spot out these bilboards and slogans painted on walls.

Being home is fantastic. It does help that its Diwali time . So there's lots of jostling and pushing in the markets which isn't quite like the sleepy town that this is meant to be. But then this place is changing so much that each time I come home I find it hard to deal with the vacant spaces where trees I knew stood and the new concrete structures that are coming up all over. But I'll leave that for another post , another time.