The Days of Being Civil

A few weeks ago, the IAS results were announced with great fanfare across newspapers in India. To be honest, I was a little surprised that it still made for front-page news given the number of career options that are there these days. It’s not like design school or hotel management results ever make it to the newspapers, so why the IAS? Perhaps it was one of those slow news days when no politician said anything embarrassing or outrageous, and there wasn’t any scam, scandal or disaster that was otherwise keeping the nation preoccupied and driving everyone into a state of outrage. It did, however, take me back to the time when, as a child, I wanted to be an IAS Officer. This doesn’t mean anything much because at various stages in my childhood I’d also wanted to be a zookeeper, a detective, a pilot, a librarian, a teacher, a sports journalist, a basketball player, a doctor, a shopkeeper and perhaps a dozen other professions that I simply cannot remember now. So it’s not like I suddenly felt that my life was a series of abject failures littered by crushed hopes, bitter disappointments and shattered dreams just because I didn’t end up being any of the above. If anything, I feel like my life has been a failure because no one is willing to pay me to just travel around and write about it.

But coming back to the IAS Officer business, as a child I had no clue what being an IAS Officer entailed, but it just sounded suitably impressive. I suppose it was because of the word Officer at the end of it – it added just that amount of heft and authoritativeness that was hard to match. Of course, when I later realized that all of Bihar came to Delhi to study for the IAS exams and it involved a level of dedicated, single-minded devotion to studying that comfortably surpassed engineering college preparations, I steered clear of the civil service exams. In any case, those were the days of a different, pre-liberalized India, when, childhood fantasies aside, apart from IAS Officer, there were precisely three career options to choose from – Doctor, Lawyer or Engineer. While Doctor had the whole nobility and lifesaving thing going for it; complex biological diagrams were enough to deter a weak-willed student such as myself who was always looking for the easy way out. Even before that, Doctor and Lawyer sounded scary since it meant more years in college and everyone told you it also meant studying for the rest of your life to stay updated in your profession. Of course, it isn’t like Engineering was a piece of cake either. After the 10^th boards, all of a sudden, the kids who took school very seriously suddenly treated it with casual disdain – school was something they just had to pass and get out of the way. 2 years of rigorous preparation and liberal burning of the midnight lamp was devoted to engineering preparation, only for a majority of them to then spend 4 years of engineering college lost in a haze of marijuana, old monk and navy cuts. Basically if you weren’t studying for medicine or law, here’s what your career choice flowchart looked like:

Pre-Liberalization Career Choice Flowchart for Someone not Studying Law or Medicine

Thankfully, by the time I got out of school, other options that involved considerably less studying did open up and I was able to slip out of the constricting dragnet imposed by the flowchart above. Now that I think of it, I suppose at least some other professions like advertising or marketing had always existed, but somehow no parent ever told you “Son, I want to see you grow up to be an advertising or marketing guy one day”.

In this day and age, though, the whole clamour for a job in the civil services does seem a little baffling. Even accounting for the security of a government job, why aren’t people as eager to join, say, the Censor Board, instead of the IAS? Of course, with the whole fiasco over Udta Punjab, it’s clear that the censor board is entirely peopled by idiots with the rational and emotional intelligence of pond scum. The qualification criterion is probably limited to displaying large amounts of incompetence with a liberal splash of sycophancy and a predilection for moral policing. But the occasional bad press aside, doesn’t it sound like one of the best jobs to have? I mean, think about it – if someone offered you money and asked if would you rather spend your days running the country or watching movies, what sounds like a more attractive prospect?

Imagine coming in to work everyday with the question “So what movies are we going to watch today?” You’d get paid to watch a particularly steamy sex scene again and again to decide whether it should be banned or not. It’s the sort of job you’d love to be thorough with. “Hey, play that bit where he utterly ravishes her naked body in a fit of passion one more time, will you? We must be absolutely sure if this warrants banning or not.” Your quarterly targets would be based on the number of movies you’d watched. Ordinary people goof off at the office and watch videos on the internet, you’d be so tired of videos that you’d probably be mastering Calculus or unraveling the mysteries of quantum mechanics in your spare time. The only downside I can think of is that if you’re really junior, you’d probably only be given the lousy Akshay Kumar or Abhishek Bachchan movies for the first few years, and you’ll have to work your way up the censor board food chain before getting access to the critically acclaimed art house stuff. Still, your job would hands down beat any of those regular jobs that involved crunching numbers or making strategic presentations.

Outside of the all-time dream job of being a travel or cookery show host, I cant think of too many jobs more enjoyable than joining the Censor Board – yet the entrance exams for the Censor Board of India barely attracts any attention at all. Perhaps the job is so attractive that no one ever quits and there’s already a 20-year waiting list like those prestigious clubs. I wish someone had told me all this 20 years ago - I'd probably have a job watching movies all day by now!