The title of this post finds its origins in a novel with simlar name written by VS Naipaul. Set in India, some 40 years ago or so, this is a kind of travelogue of author's brief stay in India where he found it to be full of superstitions, ignorance and darkness! Many decades and many MNCs and malls later, few parts of India seemed to have chucked off that tag, but there are many places that haven't and continue to remain shrouded in ignorance. Move few hours away from a city, travel in a second class train compartment or a dilapidated state transport bus and you get to see the dark underbelly of India Shining. As one of the characters in the movie Rang De Basanti says "Yahan zinda rehne ki jung mein logo ki zindagiyan nikal jaati hai" . So true it seems! My day today was spent being kind of lost in similar thoughts. To start with, I when I boarded the ST bus, a woman was wailing. She may be in her 20s or something, but she was crying in some peculiar musical tone. At...
I don't think that you quite grasped what the word 'Intelligence' means, in context of Govt. Departments, that is - and this is quite surprising given the fact that you are a grown up guy, rather than being a disgruntled teenager!
ReplyDeleteThese are the branches that most of the public service departments of the GOI have. Their job is to provide & receive covert intelligence reports which act as a pre-warning against any form of malicious activity against the concerned department(railways, in this case)- be it sabotage, or an impending terrorist strike. It is manned by a hand picked lot and presided by high ranking IPS & Railway Security Force officials.
And if your superficial post was a rant against the 'inefficiency' of such branches(which is a favourite past time for most of the young Indians), always remember that for every strike encountered, there are at leat a hundred strikes neutralized, more often than not by the same 'Special Branch Intelligence' you so stupidly mocked.