Penny-Foolish Pound-Wise, No More! the almond claims the throne

 

The problem with us retired railwaymen, the same tribe that still thinks Indian Railways (IR) needs their counsel, is that we simply cannot see much good in IR today. People say we’re stuck in the past. The past which was pound-wise and penny-foolish.

Yes, we’re traumatised by an era when we naively thought we did some jobs very efficiently with great accountability. In spite of this moronic sense of accountability, there were pinpricks galore. Like a certain tea-and-snacks grant whose monthly limit was guarded more fiercely than the Kohinoor. In those days, serving tea to visitors on official account was an exercise in administrative tightrope-walking. Offer one extra cup, and the grant evaporated. Offer too few, and your guest felt neglected. And heaven forbid you dared to serve biscuits—that was a luxury that required both courage and signed justification.

We also lived under the constant threat of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) telephone, that innocent-looking beige device sitting on the table like a silent auditor next to its poor cousin, the ubiquitous railway phone. While you could use the railway phone to your heart’s delight, not so the DoT one. In Research Designs & Standards Organisation (RDSO), you had to be really fortunate and favoured to be honoured with one, the norm being a PABX extension that you were too sheepish to put on your calling card. But you had to keep a record of all calls, mentioning official or personal. One personal call and the monthly bill arrived with the moral weight of the Ten Commandments and a deduction notice. One always felt as though one had cheated the system by slipping in some personal conversation between some quasi-official one.

And then there was the legendary logbook of the official car—a sacred manuscript maintained more diligently than some people keep their wedding vows. Every kilometre was accounted for in a deft manner to camouflage all personal use as official, never mind that at times one made seven visits in one night between home and station. Deviate from it, and you risked paying from your own pocket—an outcome worse than suspension, as apart from the monetary slap, it also showed your official standing as weak and meek.

 

Well, today we simpletons of the WAR (Wiser After Retirement) brigade, myself proudly included, have forgotten these mammoth problems that were always calling for reform. We mistakenly cavil about little irritants. We think that IR is grappling with big, existential issues that its management should be, but is not,  busy tackling. Why is the freight loading stuck crawling at 2% growth after a decade of throwing unprecedented funds at the system like confetti?

Or the mystery of why station redevelopment projects, advertised as future airports, somehow fail to attract passengers even when they are miraculously completed (which, let’s be honest, they rarely are).  Added to the make-believe woes is the ever-diminishing patronage of the ‘world-class’ Vande Bharat trains, those gleaming blue-and-white chariots of modern India. Or take the great riddle of our times, one that would make even Sherlock Holmes hang up his pipe: the vanishing Vande Bharat Sleeper—launched twice, advertised a hundred times, and yet nowhere to be found on actual rails; it’s IR’s very own ghost train, existing solely in videos, brochures, and ppt slides that have seen more mileage than the train itself. Or Kavach, the much-touted equivalent of the European signalling system, being fitted only on locomotives, while the ground equipment remains missing—making them loose bulls on rails.

But don’t be fooled. It is we who are failing to understand the true priorities of modern IR. While we fret about these trivial, meaningless matters—like revenues, passengers, trains actually running—IR’s top brass is busy with something far more profound: Reform and Transformation. And oh, what a transformation it is.

Let me give just one example and you’d appreciate the enormity of the reform. A news item which went unnoticed by us WARs was about the latest masterpiece of bureaucratic brilliance: the new, pathbreaking, civilisation-advancing meeting refreshment policy. A document so thorough, so visionary, so intellectually uplifting that future historians will mark it as the point where human administration reached its peak.

First, it divides meetings into two categories: ‘scheduled’ and ‘short-notice/short-duration’. Already, a revolutionary breakthrough in anals, sorry annals, of railway history! Next stop: Nobel Prize for Administrative Taxonomy. Of course, this is merely the diluted version. The original draft—now buried deep in some cupboard under “Too Honest to Issue”—had far more accurate classifications: ‘Boss speaks, others fiddle with their thumbs and nod like dashboard bobbleheads,  ‘Meeting at the boss’s divine beck and call, preferably when everyone is mid-chai’ and ‘Summon all buggers with immediate effect for a quick and well-marinated dressing-down’.

Then comes the culinary section—yes, the circular actually prescribes menus for meetings. And with such microscopic granularity that even NASA’s mission protocols look like they were scribbled on a napkin. Forget Chandrayaan; here we have Chai-drayaan, equipped with a thin, structurally unsound samosa, a couple of morale-neutral biscuits, and that mysterious ‘light refreshment’ whose sole mission is to obliterate both spirit and stomach in equal and impeccably coordinated measure, strictly as per SOP.

And the pièce de résistance? It specifies the exact number of almonds per person. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, IR has solved it. The age-old problem of almond inflation, corruption in dry-fruit distribution, and the menace of over-snacking bureaucrats has finally been addressed. This is not mere reform; this is renaissance.

So to all naysayers, cynics, has-beens, and retired fogeys like myself: take note. IR is marching boldly toward transformation—almond by almond, biscuit by biscuit. While we keep harping on freight performance, operational efficiency, passenger satisfaction, and trains that exist outside YouTube videos, the real warriors are designing snack protocols with the precision of cardiac surgeons.

For such WAR jokers, the famous idiom stood reversed: “God never gives almonds to those who have no teeth.” True, we didn’t have teeth.

We can stay frogs in our mossy old wells, croaking about fundamentals. Or we can climb out and rejoice in this glorious age of refreshment-driven reforms.

The choice, as always, is ours. Did I hear the Bard say, “When wisdom flees the court, good sir, the almond sits the throne.”

...