Lucky Me

Sometimes, those who think they are not lucky enough in anything (small,big or medium) discover that Lady Luck after all hasn’t entirely written off their names from her list. There are times when luck seems to come down on their heads like a ton of bricks. Something like that happened to me just a little more than a week ago.

For over a year until last week I was in a post where I was training farmers how to raise their crops (as if they didn’t know) and not fall into debts. I was almost resigned to that line of work for another couple of years before being eligible for a transfer. It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying travelling to remote villages and meeting farmers. But then I wasn’t also exactly thrilled to be doing such a thing while living alone, away from friends and family in a small town. I harbored the sort of fantasies people who are forced to live under such circumstances almost every moment conjure up. I hoped that by some miracle I would get transferred to Hyderabad.

Normally in the government one has to move heaven and earth, or if one can, shed a few tears or do some kind of skullduggery to get a transfer to a post or place of one’s choice. Not willing (and also not capable) to do any such thing I was resigned to my current bureaucratic fate of passing at least two more years of a rural stint. But, like I said before, I dreamt of a transfer to Hyderabad almost every day. But I did not even contemplate doing anything about it until out of the blue someone presented me with a wonderful chance to get a transfer to Hyderabad.

Sometime in May, I got a call from someone I did not even know asking me if I was interested to work in a post based in Hyderabad. He wanted me to replace him in his post at Hyderabad. Someone else seems to have suggested my name to him as the right, bright (?) person to take over from him in a post that I wasn’t actually eligible for. I’d been in my current post for only a year and I knew it was impossible for me to be transferred. But the kind gentleman assured me that he would make sure of my transfer if only I put in an application. Since it did not involve much to write a whiny application I did it and gave it to him. Afterwards I forgot all about it until less than two weeks ago he called me up again and gave me the wonderful news that my transfer was through.

To cut a long story short, last week I joined at the Secretariat at Hyderabad. I had not ever thought that I’d be working in the nerve center and heart of the state administration at the Secretariat at Hyderabad. This job of mine in the government is turning out to be quite interesting what with a few unusual postings. Earlier I was working in an entirely different post in the company of cops doing some bureaucratic sleuthing and enjoying it too. Once again, I am in a different post far removed from what I normally am supposed to do.

In my new post in Disaster Management, among other things, I am supposed to keep track of storms, cyclones, floods and such disasters. My job, my boss told me on the first day, begins at five in the morning with watching the weather reports on the net and the television. It was something I had never even thought I’d do in my life- watch television immediately on waking up. But then, there’s always a first time for everything.