Police in Blunderland

It has been recently pointed out by some mindful and regular readers that I haven't written in quite a bit - three weeks, which is a long time by my own long-established standards. Guilty as accused - though most bloggers, after they have posted four or five items, can't think of another thing to say to save their lives, while I have been hammering away relentlessly at the keyboard  for seventeen continuous years, and there are more than 700 posts up there now. Anyway, the reasons are a) I wanted that last post to be on the top for some time, so that it might get a lot of eyeballs (which might translate into some much-needed donations), b) I couldn't think of something really interesting to me to write about (I don't gush over Cricket World Cups), and c) the older I grow, the more self-conscious I become about the unbearable crime of repeating oneself, as old people are only too apt to do.

Old boy Abhishek Das kindly sent me a new book which I found such good reading that I finished it in three days, in between attending to many other things. Police in Blunderland, written by retired senior IPS officer Bibhuti Dash - who, among other things, served for a large part of his career with the West Bengal Police. Dash has a number of excellent academic credentials, writes polished and racy English with a lot of highly literate allusions thrown in which most engineers will never recognize, sports a dry brand of humour interlaced with a lot of decent human sensitivity, and all the makings of a good raconteur who 'tells it like it is', rarely pulling any punches. Who says all our politicians and civil servants are ignorant and stupid? There are a lot of things I hugely enjoyed, such as when he berates Shashi Tharoor for 'daring' to call himself a Hindu without having gone to Hindu (College), when he talks about a maid who was skilled at BJP (Bartan-Jhaaru-Pochha), and when he explains why it is better by far to be a senior policeman's wife than a senior policeman. There is cynical gloom when he candidly admits that the police is shot through with corruption big and petty, and it has always been like that since at least medieval times, explaining why it is so, partly because of the hard-to-resist temptations galore, partly because it is a hoary tradition, partly because those who don't do it are regarded as inconvenient fools, and partly because all the countless recommendations for reform made by courts and inquiry commissions have been gathering dust for decades (though it seems I heard someone somewhere claiming that over the last nine years bhrashtachaar has been eliminated in this country). There is also sadness covered up with quiet bravado as he chronicles his current battle with cancer and pays tributes in the last pages to all those who helped him become who he was, from a bright classmate who dropped out early to follow in his father's footsteps to become a manual scavenger to a schoolteacher who coached and motivated him effectively to reach heights which would once have been unimaginable.

Good reading, as I said: to a lot of Indians and foreign readers alike it would be an eye-opener about what it means to live intelligently and empathetically in today's India, with all its 'pageantry, magic, comicality and pain'. Read it - a book like this deserves to be widely read, like Sudha Murthy's Wise and Otherwise. You can also visit and encourage Mr. Dash at his blog, b-b-dash.blogspot.com My salute to you as a fellow-citizen and teacher, Mr. Dash, and thank you, Abhishek, for giving me such a nice gift.

P.S.: The last time I read a good book written by a policeman in India was Goyendapeeth Lalbazar, which deserves to be translated into English: see this.