Tides, Tremors & Trends: Nuggets from a Civil Servant

IN the marketplace of ideas, ideology, and public policy, the civil servants are the silent, faceless musketeers who hew and hum the parchment of public policy.

- PROF. SATYA NARAYAN MISRA

During their active service, the conduct rules emasculate their freedom of speech and expression, particularly about the fairness of public policy or the conduct of the politicalexecutive. But once they superannuate, some either become strident critics of the government of the day or write reflectively the pathways to a better India. While Mr. EAS Sarama (1965: IAS) batch is a great crusader for electoral reforms, illegal mining, Harsh Mander and Aruna Roy are well-known actvists; a few like Subba Rao or Vinod Rai belong to the latter category. Mr. Vivek Patnaik (IAS 1966), who served from the state to the centre to the international pasture of ICAO at Montreal, belongs to the classical liberal club, who is not afraid to lend his pen to stem the rot that has seeped in the global and national milieu through what he considers as the rise of ochlocracy and kakistocracy. His just-released book "Tides & Tremors of Our Time” captures through his opinion pieces in the robust English daily, The Political & Business Daily captures the angst of our times and his panacea for a better India and the world.

Vivek Babu is a political scientist by training, a historian by temperament, and an internationalist by profession. His opinion pieces hinge on four critical pillars: classical liberalism, robust faith in institutions, separation of powers, and neutrality of the civil services. Most of the pieces in the book revolve around this quartet. In Four Quartets, in the poem Burnt Norton, TS Eliot wrote: Time Past & Time Present, Are Perhaps both present in time future. In the essay 'Turning Points of History', he brings out how history has multipledefining moments, be it politics, society, science, and religion and lessons that we need to learn lest, as Santayana wrote: Those who cannot remember the past will be condemned to repeat it.