Getting Trained for the Elections and an Embarrassment of Riches

Getting Trained for the Elections

A few things are inevitable in the life of a government servant- transfers, increments, election duty and of course, retirement, said the officer who had trained us last Sunday for the elections. It was the first of the two training classes we would be attending before the actual polling that is on the sixteenth of this month. Since the training orders had said it would start at nine I was there even before it was nine. I needn’t have hurried because the hall wasn’t yet ready. Chairs were being arranged in the community hall at Madhuranagar where the training was to be held. Some of my colleagues had already reached. There was confusion for a long time before someone took the mike and began the proceedings.

In the fifteen years of my service I had participated in nearly half a dozen elections of various kinds from the elections to the Parliament to the local body elections. It wasn’t anything new except that now EVMs were being used. On Sunday at the training some of us did not get the training handbooks as everyone picked up a copy from the heaps kept on a table. The question on everyone’s lips was where would we be posted? Though we were drafted for the Jubilee Hills Assembly constituency we were told we could be sent to any place in the city. I had visions of doing polling duty in the posh Jubilee Hills locality wondering if I could see any celebrity who live in that environs. But my dreams were too premature. We were told we would know only in the next training class (on the eleventh of this month,) where we would be posted. Until then I am keeping my fingers crossed.

An Embarrassment of Riches

Er… this is an embarrassing thing, but since it already has appeared in the papers I guess there is no problem writing about it. But still it sort of makes me guilty, that in this time of recession when people are losing jobs, their pay being cut, we blokes in the government are actually getting a pay hike. The Chief Election Officer in AP gave the green signal for the pay hike it seems so next month our pay packets would be a bit heavier. It isn’t a teeny weeny hike like the one last time but quite a considerable one, nearly ten percent. Not only that we would be getting another hike that was due this month. It was literally raining pay hikes for us government blokes. Add to it the allowance we get for performing the election duty it doesn’t appear such a bad time to be a government employee.

All my pay hikes I see in terms of how many books I can buy with the extra money. But I guess this time I should be thinking of bookshelves rather than about books because the books are overflowing at home. I have to urgently buy a couple of bookshelves to store the hundreds of books I had picked up until now. I am having difficulty locating books at home. There are some books I had picked up ages ago and which I have not yet read just because they are out of sight, lying in cardboard boxes that clutter my home. If I don’t see them I don’t remember them and also don’t read them. So now I am reading the books as soon as I buy them. Next month after the pay hike I plan to buy a book I’ve been thinking of buying since a long time- Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Living to Tell the Tale.’