Caricature - Govt. Bureaucracy

Government ( elephant and five blind men syndrome )

From the time Romans started Government to manage the country to the present ( and probably future also ), nobody has been able to define adequately what Government is, though everybody knows what Government is. Government is power, babus, administering laws and rules, affect the lives of citizens in various ways, etc., In a nutshell it is an amorphous body which is supposed to look after the interests of citizens, though most citizens would question this hypothesis. There is one thing common with all governments – citizens everywhere, be it a Dane or Chinese or Indian, have an aversion to their government. The less contact between government and its populace, the more comfortable the latter are. Yet citizens realize that they have to have a government. So there is the perennial quandary for the citizens in deciding how much of government they should have. Yet there is another characteristic of government which is universal and in perpetual and that is the propensity for governments to become bigger and bigger, though all the time governments aver that they want to downsize government. Having spread the tentacles far and wide and inclination to spread it still wider, the frequent affirmations of governments to take steps to mind its business rather than that of citizens’ affairs, sound hollow. And hence citizens take this as a ritual rather than seriously.

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3. Bureaucracy (Omnipotent, Omnipresent and Omniscient )

· Bureaucrat’s lament: “ How did they ever get permission to build the world.’
· It is a poor bureaucrat who can’t stall a good idea until even its sponsor is relieved to see it dead and officially buried.
· The volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases of bureaucrat.
· A bureaucrat’s idea of cleaning up his files is to make a copy of every paper before he destroys the original.
· Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when quo has lost its status.
· Spread the bureaucrats around the organization and everything works fine but put them in a heap and everything stinks. The point is we need bureaucracy, but only to a certain extent.
· The problem, with bureaucracy is that it can’t respond rapidly to change. Its motto is “ Ready, aim, aim, aim………..it just can’t pull the trigger.”
· Bureaucracy and light are poles apart. Light travels at the fastest speed and bureaucracy the opposite.
· Bureaucracy is based on a willingness either to pass the buck or to spend it.
· Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

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