It is midday when your manager
brings you a piece of work. It is extremely urgent; he says - a proposal which
needs to go out by evening. He talks about how interesting the opportunity is,
with the formulaic beat of an insurance salesman, and as he does so, your eyes
glaze over. You try to focus on little things while maintaining the facade of
animated attention, such as his blocking of the pleasant air conditioning, the
undead flatness of his voice, and his general unattractiveness. Beyond these
distractions, you dimly piece together the requirement, which seems to be to
transform a bulky CV of some storied expert Mr. N__, into a half-page bio.
Presently you find that you are left alone, with a couple of hours to turn in
something or the other to meet your manager's expectations.
This fresh piece of
unpleasantness, you discover, changes your outlook to the day. It was not long
since you were happily thinking of ways to spend the approaching weekend,
perhaps with your romantic interest J__, and various other fanciful thoughts
which enter your mind. But now this work taints the surface of the pool of your
fantasy, promising a bitter aftertaste. The CV, when it arrives does nothing to
help things. With a sinking feeling, you discover that it is 40 pages long,
poorly formatted and replete with references and dates well before your birth.
As you sit back and evaluate your
misfortune, you are stuck by the incongruity of the entire affair. Five months
ago, you had submitted your brilliant analysis of fiscal transfers to enter
this organization, with the promise of ground breaking analysis and research.
However, fate has played its cruel hand, changing your career course to that of
an unwilling biographer, tasked with chronicling the life and exploits of Mr.
N__, who might require a small army of biographers to effectively summarize his
achievements, spanning decades and continents; into a folio of seven volumes,
let alone a half-page precis.
He has worked across
multi-billion dollar projects, with seventeen major developmental agencies,
countless national and provincial governments, and scientific and research
schools. He also boasts of close friendships with people in power - national
leaders, dictators and the like. He seems to have singlehandedly lifted a
quarter of the world out of poverty, showing governments the error of their
ways. In country A__, he has increased milk production by a factor of four, in
L__, he has decreased the number of rapes by half, in M__, he has increased the
life expectancy by eight years, and so on. He seems to be the deus-ex-machina
for any challenge in the developing world, bettering Hercules, who after all
had only twelve challenges. See – he has been the full time advisor to dictator
Z__ of P__ from 1995 to 2002, in the period transforming the man from the
dangerous and capricious demagogue he was, to the kindly and benevolent leader
he has become. Similarly, his "on ground" presence and full time
commitment for Foundation G__, from 1998 to 2005, has resulted in complete
elimination of wife beating in the godless country H__.
But wait! You smell a rat! How
could he have done two full time commitments simultaneously in countries on
either side of the world? You check the details. Things do not add up. In fact,
you find that dictator Z__ was shot dead when in his privy in 2000. Unless Mr.
N__ was his mentor in afterlife, he is in fact a complete fraud!
Armed with this hypothesis, an
investigative scan of the CV now reveals that the document makes no sense,
unless as a bundle of lies. With a crushing sense of betrayal, you recognize
what this means - children are still starving, wives are still being beaten and
women are still getting raped. Indeed, now you realize - how could Mr. N
possibly have increased milk production fourfold unless perhaps, he had clung
to the tits of cows with the same extractive hirudinal obsession which he seems
to exhibit in his fee rates.
This throws you into a drowning
reflection of legacy of this industry, of the tens of donor agencies, breeding
the hundreds of Mr. N__s, sitting in their lairs and churning out fantasies of
panacea, backed by an army of consultants and analysts to propagate the fantasy
to the next generation. Within this larger swirling maelstrom, you discover
your own face, spiraling into this script of endless lies.
So you write
“Mr. N__ has, over four decades of his professional experience (which
is closer to fifteen decades if the Mobius strip of his time perception is
hammered down to a more linear narrative) dedicated to extermination of
injustice and inequality across the world. He has championed causes beyond
count to finish god’s work (which has been incapably left incomplete).
As for his specific competencies for the assignment in question, you
will agree that they do not matter. For what Mr. N__ brings to the table is
leverageable expertise in any and every stream of conceivable (and quite a few
inconceivable) area of work. His existence is a continuum of marrying severely
unrelated techniques to equally unrelated contexts, drawing baffling inferences
from social experiments, advocacy to open closed eyes, blinding unnecessarily
open eyes and mind control. Appreciation of the entirely of his professional
wisdom in your specific study’s context (with all due respect) is impossible,
for Mr. N__ is figuratively the class of Gödel Statements in successively
nested project logics – embodying an asymptotic race towards provability and
understanding. However, be convinced that at the said asymptote, he shall
present to you the totality of wisdom of his collective (paid) experiences,
like a stunning coda!
If this does not convince you, Mr. N__ brings to the table the
intellectual cynicism and unparalleled ability of hindsight, which your project
is looking for to cover its eventually guaranteed failure. When you see Mr. N__
(which you probably might never – you see, we have not seen him yet, though he
is an associated expert for many years with our firm), you will recognize in
him the much awaited partner to your journey that you have been searching so
long. Why, Mr. N__ does not even need to exist physically (though he probably
does), for he is the leitmotif of all developmental fantasies – yours and ours;
to create that all knowing silver bullet for the world’s problems we
collectively and desperately convince ourselves we are interested in.”
You mail this out to your
manager, who unseeingly integrates it into the proposal, sending it to the
client.
The only consolation, you reflect
alone in your small room in the crowded city (watching the raucous birds going
back to their nests over the fast falling twilight), is that like all the other
proposals you have written, this one as well stands a negligible risk of being
read.
