mp junkets

To the kind attention of our MPs, MLAs, City Corporators, Mayors, Bureaucracy Big Bosses, and other such Seekers of Substance and Knowledge at the exchequer’s expense.

Actually, I need to digress for a bit. That kind attention business (pro forma, I’m given to understand, in all Official communications) is getting on my nerves. It sounds too much like a supplication; more in line with an Animal Farm, some-are-more-equal-than-others, type of democracy. Power is not doing me any favors when it pays attention to my concerns. It’s your job, you  Khas Admi *&^%(^. There is no kindness necessary. We the taxpayers, the Aam Admi, have the right to your full-time attention without having to wait till you have a moment in which to cast a kindly thought our way. We pay you salaries (handsome) which include allowances (Official and otherwise) for which we expect your attention, kind or otherwise.

There, feeling much better now, thank you for asking.

Attention: MPs, MLAs, City Corporators, Mayors, Bureaucracy Big Bosses, and other such Seekers of Substance and Knowledge at the exchequer’s expense. Here’s an idea. Instead of you folks wandering, at 5-Star expense, to far way, and quite incidentally, (I’m sure), salubrious locales, in search of solutions to India’s infrastructural needs, why not bring the managers of those salubrious locales here, to India. I mean, if San Francisco, is managing its waste disposal in a manner that has caught your attention and you think that your constituents can benefit from that expertise, why not invite the manager of that waste disposal system to come to India for a couple of weeks. That way he/she can assess the circumstances live and in color (and, it must be said, odor). That way he/she could see if the methods used to deal with trash in SF, a city with access to vast empty spaces and good roads on which to get to them, could be re-jiggered to accommodate India’s rather more cramped conditions. Surely that would be more efficient than relying on you half hour breakfast meeting with the aide to the mayor if San Francisco. You could, pay an honorarium, to the visiting bureaucrat [n.b. lower case), put her/him in a decent, oh hell, luxurious, paying guest accommodation, provide a driver and an amanuensis, let him/her mingle with us mango folk, learn what can be learned real-time and at the end of his/her sojourn, get a report that you can then submit to your colleagues. I’m sure your colleagues will appreciate the coherence and relevance of that submission, as opposed to the google-search, copy and paste reports you’d be submitting when you return from your, no doubt too exhausting for c&r, junkets. Read the report, or, at least, have it read to you what with you being khas and all and you may actually be able to fulfill your duty to your constituents.

I’m betting that would cost the exchequer far, far less than the cost of hauling your butts and betas around the world.

Kind attention, indeed.