With gratitude, for Kamrup Metro: Learnings from my first posting

 “Attitude is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Optimism is a choice. Kindness is a choice. Giving is a choice. Respect is a choice. Whatever choice you make makes you. Choose wisely.”

― Roy T. Bennett

In my opinion, the initial years of the life of a bureaucrat are close to what Gen-Z calls wanderlust, in a very sarkaari way. We travel, we keep moving, we meet people, listen to stories, understand cultures and make our living out of this whole system. A rather simpler way of looking at things, but that's how the past few months had been. After a long training stint in Delhi and Mussoorie, I finally found my first posting in Guwahati, as SDO Sadar, Kamrup Metro. 

As I keep telling people, I think I am adulting with my job. I wasn't this lady with prim sarees and work glasses 2 years back, service evolved me, for the good. But just like a teen entering college after finishing school with bright colours, my first posting made me antsy, and nervous and shook my foot like nothing else. I felt I knew nothing as an officer, and suddenly I was expected to fill the big shoes of working in a state capital. I remember telling my collector, to consider me a pseudo-probationer, till I actually learn how to work my way through. But despite that, and hugely because of the extreme kindness of my mentor, I learnt more in these 1.5 months than I learnt from a whole year on probation. Once again, we might revisit these learnings sometime from now, but for now, I feel like sharing them with all of you.

1. Learning from the books: One of the first lessons I learnt in this posting was to read. And read a lot. I keep meeting people who tell me, "Ab to aap IAS ho gayi hain, ab dusre padhege aapke liye", but I really found the contrary. As a leader of my team, I had to guide my staff, and people would look at me expectantly to know the answers to problems. I was assigned a task where we had to rebuild an office from scratch, as most of the senior staff was no more present. I learnt from and with my staff, but reading came in handy at every step.

2. Tackling fear: I somehow landed up in a posting where the staff was averse to work at first. There was a narrative running, which was letting people be scared of performing their work. But as an officer, the trust could be trickled down to the junior staff only when I'd lead by example. And staff would work best when they'd see me as a part of the team and not just someone ordering them around.

3. Patience and Public Interactions: Ours is a job where people look up to us for the resolution of problems. But not always do I have solutions. It is easier said that you can listen to the person once, but with the numbers running in hundreds per day, sometimes public interactions become daunting. As a learning, I only now know to be a little more patient, with people as well as with myself, because solutions do pop up, if not immediately but eventually.

4. Creating narratives and breaking barriers: It is easy to create a narrative in our job, all we have to do is, repeatedly act in a certain way and people will just know. It's true in both personal and professional sense. I would sometimes chat with my staff about their lives, and they soon started coming to me with things which were often not put up in front of me, in the doubts of how the officer would take it. I often took "officer like behaviour" too seriously. But humans work best when there is a free flow of communication, and the effort needs to come from the side of the officer.

5. Not all days are sunshine and roses: There have been days when getting anything done felt impossible, sometimes because of personal fallacies, other times due to institutional lethargy. We often aim in our imaginations and it feels quite simplistic, but is it so simple really? Not always. Thus it now has become an accepted ability to switch off on days like these. To again, be patient and wait for the solution to come to you. To not rush and not jump to conclusions. Public service is patient, yet active. 

In the end, despite having a new posting to look up to, and many new challenges to be excited about, my heart is just full. With gratitude, for Kamrup Metro, and all the people, who helped me learn and grow. I recently watched 12th fail, and the notion of "Restart" has stuck with me. When nothing is fixed and we are in constant transience, what else feels right except restart? Here's to a new posting, some new challenges and a new restart.