Aspiring to be Ambani
Whether one hopes to join the Civil Services or become a billionaire, the real prize is the wealth of happiness
India’s steel frame is feeling rattled. Sanjeev Sanyal, economist, author and member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, recently said, while every country needs a bureaucracy, “lakhs of people are spending their best years trying to crack an exam where a tiny number of a few thousand people actually are going to get it”.
And when they do get it, large parts of the job are “dull and boring” because it is all “about passing les up and down”.
That has raised some civil servant hackles.
Yet, Sanyal is hardly the
rst to say this. In Upamanyu Chatterjee’s famous novel English, August, the young protagonist, Agastya, thinks he’s leaving his listless upper-class life for a more “meaningful context” when he joins the Civil Services. He is told by a mentor: “In my time I’d wanted to give this Civil Services exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L.H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits.” But
Agastya quickly nds his Civil Services life in the “real India” is a morass of mindless masturbation and marijuana.
Sanyal has been accused of elitism — dismissing the dreams of those from Tier II and Tier III towns where many civil servants come from these days. Sanyal has said he was not disparaging the service, just wondering whether it was worth spending the best years of one’s life doggedly trying to crack the examination, over and over again.
He called it a “poverty of aspiration” and wondered: “At the end of it, if you must dream, surely you should dream to be Elon Musk, or Mukesh Ambani, why did you dream to be Joint Secretary?”
Only Sir Humphrey Appleby, the bureaucrat of Yes Minister television serial fame, might have an answer to that. But what is interesting is how neatly the old holy trinity of the IAS ocer, doctor and engineer has been replaced by new icons such as Elon Musk and Mukesh Ambani.
There is nothing wrong about aspiring to be billionaires. Millions of people surely do. But Musk and
Ambani are essentially cut from the same opulent cloth. We have just replaced one straitjacket of ambition with another. English, August’s Agastya is told: “For most Indians of your age, just getting any job is enough. You were more fortunate for you had options before you.”
Trapped in a box
It turns out there weren’t that many options after all when it came to dreaming. If the old India had dreamed of a “stable job”, this new one is being told to dream of being billionaires. One box has replaced the other but we still do not dare to dream outside the box.
Responding to Sanyal’s remarks, his namesake, Sanjeev Chopra, a former IAS ocer and Festival Director of Valley of Words, wrote that had he not joined the Civil Services, he might have chosen a career in media or academia. “Would that make my contribution to the nation any less?” he wondered. “Others may want to pursue dierent professions — law, architecture, software, and so on. Why this
Civil Services aspirants outside an examination centre in New Delhi.
obsession with ‘wealth creation’ and maximising shareholder value?”
I have a close friend who is a very successful neurosurgeon. He was a good student but not the best student in class when we were in school, but over time he has excelled in his eld. His name pops up in the Best Surgeon lists routinely. He could rest on his laurels now. Yet, he is working even harder than before to set up his own start-up that could revolutionise brain cancer diagnostics by making the procedure minimally invasive. I do not think it’s because he wants to be the next Ambani in his eld. He does it because he has a dream to make a dierence and one life to do it in. When I hear him talk excitedly about tumours and technology, most of it goes over my head. What I understand clearly though is the excitement in his voice. He sounds frazzled but happy.
The true jackpot
We want to be rich or famous or successful or rst in class. But in the end, what we really keep hoping is that all of those will make us happy. The real jackpot for any of us is to be contented with what we are doing, whether that’s building a business empire, setting up a shelter for stray animals, drawing cartoons or being a librarian somewhere. In all this discussion about the poverty of aspiration, we routinely forget to talk about the wealth of happiness.
That’s why when we bless someone, we often say, ‘Live long. Be happy’.
And you don’t have to be a Musk or Ambani or doctorengineer-civil servant for that.
is the author of Don’t Let Him Know, and likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether
asked or not.