by Ruskin Bond
The faculty, like the students, came from all parts of the country. Despite the fact that they spoke different languages at home, they had much in common. They had a thorough academic grind before they went abroad, another consummate one while there, a desire to return to the country, and a dream to do something worthwhile.
In the formative years of the university, there used to be a lot of social mixing transcending the ethnic and regional barriers, perhaps much more than what could be sustained for a long time. With time, the pattern changed. Like an expanding gas breaking up into small zones of matter, the faculty society stabilised into small clusters of about four to five families, the most common binding element being a common language, the next a common professional specialisation. Happily, despite this social fragmentation, the level of malice of one group towards others never rose beyond minor smears, and there still existed a tremendous amount of genuine goodwill, which would be quite unlikely in a society consisting of elements from heterogeneous background. It was probably an attribute of groups geographically and otherwise totally isolated from the mainstream of life, that they had little to worry or talk about except small local problems, happenings, and gossip. So, in a very deep way all the groups were actually very similar, despite differences of language, food, and other fare. It was interesting to note how even among the faculty who came from the same geographical region and spoke the same language, groups formed depending on the nature of common interests. From the surface, discords hardly showed; the dominant impression was that they were blessed with a quiet, comfortable, and happy existence.
What consumed the faculty from inside was its yearning to do research which, to any meaningful degree of satisfaction, it could not do here. This aspiration had the least to do with the written letters of objective the university proclaimed; that would have been easy to ignore. It was more an inner self-centred urge to discover something unknown, to create something until then non-existent, an urge whose seed was planted by some now-forgotten teacher of the past, that got nurtured imperceptibly but continuously through the same path along which advanced professional knowledge was acquired. Deep down perhaps it was a craving for immortality, however illusory it might be; or, in a way perhaps no less important than reaching the goal, to derive satisfaction that one was working towards such a goal. Something difficult, something worthwhile. In fact, most of the faculty would not have arrived here if the place had not promised such a potential facility.
One faced the fundamental question whether it was sensible to plant western science and technology in an alien soil and expect fruition regardless of the degree of economic and social incompatibility between the land of the seed and the land the seed was planted in. Teaching was one matter; research—creation of new knowledge—another, the human and material resources required in the two cases had substantial differences. Besides visionary architects and efficient overseers it required tangible material resources to create such an edifice. Whatever hopes existed here stemmed mostly, it now seemed, from an immature dream that had now evaporated tracelessly from a combination of blunders and plunders of a few. The faculty came with infinite energy; it was a pity it was still running around compulsively and endlessly, not accepting and learning though seeing the writing on the wall. It was a strange collective activity that originated at the individual level – each striving alone, keeping the details as exotic secret from others. Yet periodically, if infrequently, accumulated frustrations burst forth unrestrained in unison. The peace and complacence were only of the surface.
At the top right corner of his field of vision Virendra saw the figure of a tallish slender woman in a white sari emerging from the spot under the catwalk at the lecture hall complex and walking past an amaltas tree taking one of the diagonal shortcuts across the field towards the library. He recognised her as one of the library staff. So, it must be eight o'clock, the time when the library opened. Between now and nine, only a skeleton staff would be present in the library; all the services opened fully only at nine, when the rest of the staff came. Not only the library, all of the offices of the university opened at that time, and the administrative activities began. There was a fair number of the staff who had accommodation on the campus, but several busloads of them came from the city. The buses, originating from different parts of the city, usually reached the academic area gate at about the same time. They disgorged their contents at the academic area gate, and large groups of staff walked along the main drive towards the main building. The trek made an interesting sight from one of the upper storeys of the main building.
The offices hardly came alive suddenly with work activity. There were attendance registers to sign, and greetings to exchange. Virendra had not noticed anything excessive about the latter in the university offices after some major religious festival such as Holi – the festival of colours, or Diwali – the festival of lights. At that time embracing and formally wishing each other well was the order. But the daily ritual probably had been taken to its limit at the campus bank, where every morning, when the bank opened, some fifty odd employees all shook hands with one another before they sat down to consider the day's work. If one was not in a rush, it was an enjoyable sight to watch.
There were two things that made the body of the staff stand distinctively apart from their other two counterparts in the university, that is, the students and the faculty. First, most of the staff came from this state itself. The ordinary technical and administrative jobs did not usually appear sufficiently attractive to people from distant places. With the former, therefore, came a full body of local culture, with all its positive and negative aspects. They were warm, hospitable, but generally rather lethargic people; there was a philosophical calm in their nature, with no hurry to go anywhere. This was in distinct opposition to the attributes of the faculty and the students. They were in a perpetual rush to get things accomplished. They must have it this very day.
The other aspect of the difference was deeper. While both the faculty and the students were globally tuned in professional interaction, which also included actual travel to and from distant places, the world of the staff was firmly grounded in the campus enclosure, both physically and mentally. For them it was just a job, a means of livelihood; there was little perception about their role in realising the intangible dreams of the academics. And nobody corrected this lack of comprehension of theirs, and nobody cared to tell them about the value of their assistance either.
In the absence of a clear idea about their role, value, and importance in the system, the third and the decisive cause of alienation perhaps was the perception of the higher social and economic class the faculty belonged to and to which the students would eventually belong, something that would be never possible for them. It was not that they were totally unaware of the reasons why it was so, what actually their role was or should have been, but in the face of difficult economic situation and lack of compassionate explanation, the truth did not permeate into them. The only way they could easily retaliate or show their displeasure was by not participating in the forward process enthusiastically, by abstaining from cooperation. With secure jobs, from which nobody could or rather would displace them, this could be executed so easily. Exceptions were many, but this was the chief underlying refrain.
The picture was different twenty years ago. That was the time of the initial recruitment, preparing for the time ahead. The faculty was young, the experience of a new university blossoming was intoxicating, there was enthusiasm in the air, and the concerns of personal promotion through the ranks were distant. Regardless of the level of skill, everyone was trying to do the best one was capable of. The better workers had not then quite established their edge, which was later going to displease those who had fallen behind. The university administration had little experience and wisdom to provide the right incentive and recognition to those who were accomplishing better, and the necessary administrative pressure to those who were tending to be delinquent.
But even in that best
of times, the technical assistance for experimental work and support from ancillary facilities was meagre against the requirement of the institution and also of the faculty aspirations to take up new projects. Nationally the government had at that time decided to create central research sponsoring agencies, and was inviting research proposals for funding. The western practice of seeking external research grants, making time-bound commitments to sponsoring agencies, and a desire to get ahead of others at any cost, sounded the death knell to the internal system. The university had some funds, but not adequate for full support for every member of the faculty. So necessarily it had to encourage its faculty to solicit outside grants, which resulted in making more commitments than the system was able to meet. The way it first vitiated the working of the system was the availability of cash funds from these outside projects.
Before that time, there was enough resistance in the university administration to grant monetary remuneration to the staff for getting a job well done or done in extra time. A major reason behind this was that the government rules were quite stringent in appropriating its funds for such purpose, and the auditors would have hardly allowed it. For outside funds, it was quite a different story; there was no stringent guideline, and the university was not directly responsible. Furthermore, for the faculty running the administration and the same faculty needing extra services from the staff, it was relatively easy to endorse financial incentives for overtime work. The first beneficiaries of this payment were truly the best workers, because it was their services that the faculty sought most. This included almost every cadre of workers: typists for typing papers, draughtsmen for making drawings for publications, glass blowers for helping with glass equipment, and machinists in various workshops. Those whose work skill was mediocre and whose services were not sought, took it quietly for some time, accepting it as recognition to better workers. But the process did not stop there; it soon went one step further.
In the beginning the better workers took this award of additional money as a token recognition and with gratitude; it did not affect their sincerity to the regular work. But soon there were de facto enticements to those workers from some of the faculty with funds from outside projects, to somehow do their work in regular hours and be paid clandestinely as overtime work, because certification of overtime work rested primarily with the faculty member. And the workers started abiding by this. It was at this time that the ordinary worker, who was not particularly good at his job but was watching some of his colleagues getting paid extra time for regular time work, first struck. Initially he tried wooing some of the project investigators to see if he himself could get some overtime assignment. When he failed, he first started being very slow at his work. And gradually he replaced this method by a complete stall.
Ironically, the faculty members who were most guilty of thus corrupting the system were among the senior ones. They were also the influential ones outside the university and in the government to easily attract major grants for their research and to spend recklessly for their own benefit and wrecking a system for good. The younger faculty followed suit because the system would no longer respond to any other approach.
The university was also having other problems. As a result of its inexperience, it had hired a large number of labourers, literally hundreds, on daily-wage basis during the time of building up the civic facilities. It worked very well in the beginning, and went on peacefully for years. The university got its work done without having these workers on its permanent payrolls, which was in a way less expensive. There were rules that as long as a person was not in continuous service for more than a certain number of days, he had no rights to permanent employment. The overseers methodically gave periodic gaps in hiring these labourers so that no such claim would arise. Even from a cursory look it would appear quite improper to keep a person in some form of employment but not giving him the opportunity to get regularised. But for the labourers, they could hardly do anything but accept the process – there were too many examples in the country where the deal was much rawer. And there were no rebels. But other storms were in the works elsewhere.
By then the university had been in existence for several years, and among the staff there had been promotions to the next higher cadre. There was hardly any norm in those processes; they were mostly initiated by departmental authorities on counsel of the senior faculty, sometimes to raise the rank of a superior worker, sometimes just to reward their sycophants. As time progressed, it turned out that more often than not those promoted were not the best workers, so every such step infuriated their colleagues, and alienated them from university administration. Until then the administration had not faced any organised opposition either from the faculty, or from the students, or from the staff. In the name of forthrightness and strong administration, considerable highhandedness had crept into those in authority which even for an impartial man was becoming difficult to endure.
Neither the rank and file of the regular staff nor the daily wage labourers did have a union, nor did they know how to organise themselves into one. This gap was filled by a few sensitive members of the faculty who, thoroughly against an elitist running of the university, lent leadership to the staff, encouraged the emergence of a group of leaders from the staff themselves, and demanded from the administration redress of a long list of grievances of the staff, and permanent employment for the daily-wage labourers, the most rebellious component of the group, who had nothing to lose in an all-out confrontation.
In the history of this university, those were the worst days on the campus. There was constant shouting of slogans and abuse, disturbance of classes and other academic activities. Then electricity was cut off to the campus community by the workers, and in that darkness there were processions by hundreds with flaming torches. Finally the water lines were cut off. There were more complications and blunders by the administration. Eventually the students and faculty also turned against the administration. Calm returned with the forced resignation of the vice-chancellor; ironically he was one of those who loved the university most. The daily-wage labourers, most of whom had not the minimum formal qualifications to become an employee of the university, got regularised and a number of other demands of the staff were met.
With the passing of years the promotion of the staff became nearly automatic. Deserving or not, without any thorough scrutiny or assessment, promotion and pay increase took place. The mediocre and the incompetent remained exactly as they were in the beginning. Only the competent lost their edge, sharpness of skill, and enthusiasm for work, because long ago they had ceased to be anyone special and cared for. The salaries of most of them were on the high side. Some degree of affluence set in, which could be seen in the dress they wore, the vehicles they kept. The union was there; as time passed, its members participated in its activities including ceremonial parades on its foundation day with elephants, torches, and so on, but its rebel character was totally gone. Its leaders, some of whom probably thought that the activity could lead to a revolution of the proletariat, were still there, but in a deep sense pathetically jobless. The faculty that had joined the workers, in time made the association loose; some reconciled to humble teaching; some roamed around on cars like any other non-rebel variety. Virendra used to see once in a while one member of the staff who was once a spearhead. He still had the looks of a rebel and a poet. The success of his followers did not make him obese, but there was no longer fire in his eyes. He probably knew that those days would not return again. Virendra sometimes wondered what his thoughts were.
The staff activities in general were now in low key; some were in petty activities outside the official duties. In some the effort of making some extra money during the time of formal duties had become common. In the aeronautical engineering department, there was a clerk who took up part-time insurance and investment business. He went from department to department dropping pamphlets in mailboxes of the faculty trying to interest them in his services. In the accounts office, one clerk ran to the pos
t office every now and then; he was specialising in the investment in government papers. From time to time one particular technical officer could be seen distributing among a group of staff bits of papers; apparently this had to do with the administering of a lottery racket. In the computer centre, one of the computer operators had a business of buying railway tickets and making railway reservations; the city was so far away that many people used his services regularly. In the workshop, several workers had private machine shops in the city; they used part of the official time for collecting private job orders with the promise of quick delivery, which was attractive to the faculty with research projects. There was a university bus conductor, who sold women's dresses in spare time; one could see him from time to time with an oversized suitcase on his cycle. There were a couple of transformer and motor winders perpetually busy with such business outside the office time. Typists in many departments ran their business right from their seats, extra payment for special favour of getting the work done in regular time. Left out were those who did not have any such skill or enterprise, and also those who, like water droplets on lotus leaves, were not touched by the lure or the murk.
Virendra knew the caretaker, who was one such person. He had a band of dedicated workers with him, who were inspired by his personal example. Without them, the scores of classrooms and blackboards in them would not be found spotlessly clean every morning. The university administration had never formally recognised his good work, but he carried on steadfastly regardless. By looking at that bald-headed slim man active on the third floor of the library, ever busy replacing the new unbound journals to the shelves one would not know how rotten the system otherwise had become. By looking at the diminutive and stoic accounts officer, who sat quietly and erect behind his desk, who once told Virendra that he had wished and somewhat planned for an academic career, pleasant but granite firm, it was impossible to guess how eroded the work ethic of many of his subordinates had become. And by only knowing Virendra's one-time assistant who helped him tirelessly in his undergraduate courses day in and day out without complaint, one would have no idea that this brand of staff was not getting replenished.