So you feel promotions should be quicker?

S.M.Singru

I find it curious that my young IRAS friends should quibble about promotions, arguing that they should be made quicker throughout the career. In their exalted expectations, one of them has even remarked that the first promotion is like one’s first love—it is soon forgotten. I do not agree.

Who says one always forgets one’s first love? That is the one time in life when you get delightfully swept off your feet! The raw, delectable feeling of expectancy, which soaks that experience, is not matched by anything in life. Later on, you anchor yourself too much to real and mundane factors like maturity, composure, public image, and so on and, in the bargain, lose all that is associated with spontaneity. Even more so, the first promotion is really the one which brings you some money for your self and your wife—the later ones do not have much real value because your children make a clean sweep of the arrears. I remember that when I got the first promotion arrears, I took my wife to a fashionable restaurant to eat a costly meal, which we could not have afforded earlier, and rounded off the meal with a fair number of ice-cream cups. I even purchased a pair of dark goggles, which was my ambition ever since I had observed Dev Anand, with his goggles, chasing his heroines in the song sequences of Bombay seafronts and parks in the black and white movies of our times. Later on, this fondness for dark goggles was lost because all South Indian heroes had dark goggles on all the time, besides having a ubiquitous police constable by their side on the posters.

In fact, by the time you get subsequent promotions, the chances are that you have built up a collection of TV, three-in-one, washing machine, and other similar gadgets, which ensure your respectability in the officers’ colony. Here, my friend, S. Parthasarathy has propounded a theory. He says these household gadgets have ears, and as soon as they hear you telling your wife about an impending promotion, they go out of order, sometimes taking turns. This means that the arrears of promotion (or whatever is left after the children have taken a swipe at them) have to be deployed in getting these gadgets repaired, and not much is left either for yourself or your wife. Brilliant, isn’t it?

And, these days, the first promotion gives you a designation, which, in the eyes of your in-laws is respectable—Divisional Finance Manager! At our times, we had no end of trouble in explaining to our in-laws why we went over from being Junior Accounts Officers (which was bad enough) to Senior Accounts Officers, when the fellows in the state PWD also had the same designation (i.e. SAOs) and yet used to maintain a car (thanks to their preoccupation with passing contractors’ bills) while we could get a Vespa scooter allotment from the Ministry of Industrial Development, GOI, only after waiting for two years. And the purchase had to wait for a scooter advance to be sanctioned by the FA&CAO, who used to ask embarrassing and personal questions like: How will the purchase of a scooter improve your performance, and all that. Believe me, when I was a JAO, my batch mate in IA&AS who was posted as Assistant Accountant General had managed to win the hand of a pretty bride by convincing her parents that he was a General!

There is yet another occupational hazard with the later promotions. You find that your status, as per the job content and the job description broadly remains same even as you think that you are climbing up the organizational ladder. The Schedule of Powers’ revisions merely allow for inflation while your self-esteem seems to undergo a gradual but sure deflation. You continue to do the same job because the mandarins sitting in the Railway Board and Headquarters believe that a job is not well done except at higher and higher levels. So, you believe that you have been running, while the track below your feet has been slipping, and so your geographical position actually remains same. That is when you realize the wisdom of the saying: Traveling hopefully is better than to arrive.

And the most cruel and hurting Parthian shot comes a little before your retirement. Just when your wife, children, and the in-laws are getting ready for your decategorisation as a no-good member of the family (who “won’t be able to get even the VIP quota”), your Department promotes you to the HAG—an acronym for Higher Administrative Grade (as if the earlier SAG was not insulting enough) which seals your description as a hag in everybody’s eyes.

So, my young colleagues, cherish your first few promotions, and do not worry about when and how the subsequent ones will come. A great philosopher has said, “Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either come to you, or its loss will not be felt”. So with apologies to him, what I would say is, “ Seek ye first your first promotion, and the remaining ones will either come to you, or their loss will not be felt!”