Bureaucratic green tape

My thoughts circle back to the days when I worked in the Ministry of Environment and Forests. An urgent call from the Additional Secretary to rush to his room gave me a chance to experience an epiphany. It was early 1994. On arrival, I found another officer, a Joint Secretary, too, seated there. Beside him was a gracious lady — all three raptly listening to a song from a cassette player, an unusual thing in the office environment. That’s when I met Sai Paranjpye. She’d approached the ministry for financial help to make a film on wildlife. We’d a plan going for environmental education and awareness and her film fit the bill.

No sooner had Paranjpye left than the Additional Secretary belched his sarcasm, “Gana suna ne se paisa milta hey kiya?” As we trooped off the room, the Joint Secretary turned to me: “Heard what this blighter said!”

Soon, the file landed on my table for financial approval. We concurred and sent it back for the approval of the secretary, deemed the competent financial authority in government parlance.

A few months later, the Joint Secretary was on the line. “Remember Sai Paranjpye’s proposal which you’d concurred? Now the file is lost! ‘Lost’ means ‘locked’ in the Additional Secretary’s cupboard!”

The depravity scorched. As we scrambled amid the crush of chaos of the lost file, we did a bureaucratic workaround to nail the mischief and make right what morally was egregiously wrong. With a fresh proposal from Paranjpye, this time we toggled the file on the Joint Secretary-Director (Finance)-Financial Adviser-Secretary axis — bypassing and leaving the Additional Secretary flatfooted.

I’d forgotten about the file when one day getting back from a meeting, I found a note on my table. “Dear Mr Mohanty, I’m lucky to have got your ministry’s funding. Papeeha is done. We’re planning a premiere of the film at India International Centre (IIC) this coming Monday. I came to invite you with family. It’s a small group with no other bureaucrat! I’m leaving for Bombay this evening, but please do join us. Regards, Sai Paranjpye.”

She was delighted to see us when we arrived at the IIC, her face still iridescent in my mind. It was a small gathering. She’d many good things to say, she knew every detail: “I’ve seen the worst and best of Indian bureaucracy!”

I lost touch with her. Now when I read her line on Papeeha in her memoir A Patchwork Quilt: “It was great to experience the effect of the ‘green tape’ of the government, for a change,” my mind flicks back to this incident.

‘Green tape’ it was — literally and metaphorically — to help the eminent film producer with her mononymous Papeeha!