Too Dear

I once read a story set in Monaco – a tiny country in Europe on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean. The tale is by the grandmaster Tolstoy himself, and humorously recounts the ordeals this micro-nation faces as it deals with a murderer to bring him to justice, and it goes something like this:

Once there is a tiny nation with a king and a few thousand thousand citizens. It has a council of ministers, it’s own judiciary and its own 60-something army. It also levees its own taxes on the folks to generate a modest national budget with which the treasury pays the ministers and the judges and the civil servants. But most of its money comes from a gambling house – the only legal one left in the entire continent other countries had already banned all gambling institutions – for obvious reasons.

So anyways, one day there is a murder that happens in town. The culprit is found, tried and sentenced to sentenced to death by execution. Because the country has never executed anyone before, the council decides to hire a guillotine and an executioner from France. This proves too expensive so they try the Italians, but they too are almost as expensive. Next they try bringing in their military. Alas, no one in the army was trained to kill, and no one would do the job. So they put him in a prison with a special guard to keep watch. But this also proves too expensive for the king’s small treasury. 

The interesting part comes when the council, in a bid to make the culprit run away of his own accord, retracts his guard. The prisoner does not run away. When asked to run away freely, the prisoner retorts that since his reputation and business are now damaged by the court, and since he has not been given what was promised to him – first a quick death by the guilotine, then life imprisonment – he won’t just go away. He has nowhere to go. 

At last, in a fit of exasperated genius, they come up with a plan: since he won’t go away for free, just pay him an annual allowance to make him get lost! The king approves the plan, the guy likes it (duh!), emigrates to a place across the border some quarter-hour train ride away, and lives happily ever after, minding his own business. Of course, he punctually reports to the treasury to get his annual allowance. 

After much travails, every one is happy. Wubba Labba Dub Dub!

Honestly though, this story came to my mind because recently I have been doing some rounds in the capital to take care of some administrative works related to my dairy project. Over the week, I literally walked the whole length of Thimphu and back just to get a precious few letter from some authorities that would allow me to get a Swiss dairy expert to come and train us. The entire process was grueling and it left me wanting. I came back from “the Land of Opportunities” to my homeland in the hope of something good for my community. Gradually, this system in which a lot of complacent bureaucrats do the bare minimum to keep their jobs, where almost no one goes out of the way to offer an iota of help, has sapped my motivation and left me alienated.

Look, I understand that no one within the system is trying to make it difficult for anyone, but with too many acts, requirements both real and imagined in place, sometimes it gets a little too much for the honest people doing what all humans do – fulfilling our basic needs in this complex society. It doesn’t help that, in the words of a prominent citizen, “complacency, indifference and self-serving mindset are so firmly set in our system.”

I really hope that as a nation, we can refine our bureaucracy so that we do not have things in place for expediency or because of some inexplicable spontaneity of origin. We all deserve better, man!