A Writer's Journey through the Bureaucratic Maze: A True Account

An inspiring tale of patience, persistence, and perseverance – the essential characteristics a writer needs to succeed.

A WRITER’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE BUREAUCRATIC MAZE

(A True Account)

PAUL SHONA

Books by the same author

Quest for Second Sex (Erotic romance fiction)

A Writer’s Journey through the Bureaucratic Maze

(A true account)

Copyright

Copyright © 2017 held by author Paul Shona.

All rights reserved.

No parts of this book may be copied in any form, or recoded on any form of electronics or other devices, without the express permission from the author.

Formatting by Wild Seas Formatting

(WildSeasFormatting.com)

Cover Design by Dar Albert at

pistoliqued@gamil.com

ISBN – 13: 978 – 1544677668

ISBN – 10: 1544677669

The account of events is accurate to the best of author’s recall capability. The names of places of residence and work are authentic whereas those of persons have been altered to protect their identities.

For comments, inquiries, or contact with the author, go to author.writes_as_paul_shona@yahoo.ca

I want to sincerely thank my editor for her diligent assistance, advice, suggestions, and support, at:

www.momofemmett@gmail.com

This work is dedicated to my wife, Kam Chawla,

daughters Shelly Chawla, and Sharon Salter,

and grandson, Nicholas Salter.

Introduction

This is an inspirational book for both current and potential employees aspiring to pursue their writing interests in a bureaucracy. Since writing requires a lot of disciplined dedication, patience, persistent, and perseverance, I offer here a true personal account of how I used these key characteristics to pursue my writing aspirations in a federal bureaucracy. I sincerely want to forewarn all those aspiring to join a bureaucracy about the kind of obstacles and roadblocks they may encounter while pursuing their dream careers.

I was really pleased when I was offered, in September 1968, an opportunity to work in Canada, and that too, at one of the federal government departments, widely known as the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (re-named as Statistics Canada since the early seventies). This federal statistical agency (hereafter referred to as the Bureau) is considered one of the best in the world. As a professional statistician, I felt proud to be a part of it.

At the time I joined the Bureau, I was twenty-eight-and-a-half years old, with four university degrees (two bachelors and two masters) in hand, and the fifth, a doctoral degree, just missed by an official paper (as I was asked to make some revisions in my thesis). I had way more of human capital (that is, education and skills) than needed to perform on the job. I thought I had found the right place to pursue my professional career, earn my name and fame as a writer. To me personally, name and fame matter more than money. It’s not that money is not important in life. Indeed, it is, and one should always have enough of it to provide a good life and comforts to one’s family. The job, with a good starting salary as well as supplementary benefits including a defined benefit pension plan, offered a rosy future.

Once on the track, I realized that I was on the highway with no turn in sight. I was driving my new and costly vehicle on a road full of cracks, potholes, and ditches. Even when I saw from a distance the yellow signs to get off the highway, those signs proved deceptive as I approached them and read them as no exit, road closed, or road closes after one kilometre. Haplessly, I kept on driving patiently on the highway. The bumpy and traumatic ride shattered my heart’s arteries and back bones as well as totally damaged my high cost vehicle. I had paid a heavy price just because of one wrong turn on the highway.

I don’t want you or anyone else to take this kind of wrong turn in pursuing or navigating your career in a bureaucracy. Think clearly and assess your personality before entering it. If you are an introvert, ambitious, serious, soft spoken, creative, have no tolerance for fools, not a people-pleaser, and are simply task-oriented, then think twice before entering a bureaucracy. You may not be able to go too far, or stepping up the ladder of success may not be that easy, or even possible.

On the other hand, if you are an extrovert, likeable, people-pleaser, have a good ability to talk (even meaninglessly), then joining the bureaucracy may turn out to be good, or very good for you. You may be able to accomplish more than you ever dreamed of, because the bureaucracy value and reward these traits way more than sincere hard work and/or technical skills.

Even though we alone are the architect of our life, we, as employees, still expect the work environment to be fairly equitable for people of all kinds of personalities. It should encourage us, appreciate and recognize our work, reward us accordingly, and give due credit to our work. Consequently, at the end of each day, we expect to come home, happy and contented, and peacefully engage in other domestic and social tasks.

On the other hand, if we are working in an unpleasant, unappreciative, nagging, and belittling environment, we come home cursing and bitching - making everyone around us quite unhappy as well. That’s how we humans act - we transfer our anger and unhappiness at work on to family members, colleagues, and friends without any reason.

The bottom line here is that for employees, work surroundings do play quite an important role in their day-to-day life, achievement, mood, and behaviour. Those working on their own accounts, or self-employed, on the other hand, create their own work environment - like interacting well with their clients, paying attention to their needs, and delivering good services. For this group, the clients and their business make their day.

I fully recognize that there’s hardly a work environment without any ups and downs. Successes and failures are part of our work-life. Nonetheless, for paid workers, such successes and failures are very much influenced by employer’s discretionary actions, including rewarding and appreciating work of one and belittling or downgrading that of another - even if both have similar education, have put in the same amount of effort, resource, and time. This sort of systemic partiality or bend toward a very few on the part of employers is skin deep and has prevailed for centuries in both the public and private sectors. The success or failure of a paid worker exclusively rests on the employer’s personal whims. A worker’s efforts alone aren’t enough to pave the road to his/her success on the job.

I strongly believe that despite your employer’s personal biases, you can still achieve your goal by simply having a strong desire, sheer determination, hard work, and stubborn dedication. Granted, you may encounter some failures and delays on the way, but eventually you will reach where you are determined to reach.

Most often, such failures and disappointments are likely to discourage you to continue your efforts, but you have to be resilient enough to keep working on your set objective. Don’t ever deviate from your objective. I know it’s easier said than done, but you have to show your mettle in tough times. I am sure you know the popular expression that God helps those who help themselves. That’s the key message of this book.

This book isn’t a simple exposé of my frustrating career at the Bureau. Neither does it criticise any federal bureaucracy including that of the Bureau. It simply dwells on what I personally experienced - discouragements, disappointments, and blockages - in order to keep up my desire to write year after year. I want to forewarn all those aspiring to join the bureaucracy as creative and productive writers, that don’t be disappointed if you can’t achieve what you want to as you are working under a very rigid and formidable layered system. Some may learn from my experiences and may improve their path to progress, while others may make mental notes to cultivate more effective ways to pursue their writing career.

Since the book provides a true account of events and experiences, it stays away from writing dramatic scenes describing physical expressions including facial and hand gestures, screaming arguments, sarcasms, or dialogues. I simply narrate these events and experiences in an autobiographical context.

The book comprises seven chapters and three appendices.

Chapter One describes my humble beginning back at New Delhi (India) where I spent the first twenty-four years of my life. That’s where my desire to become a famous writer seeped in my head, and I began to cultivate my habit to read and read and read - because extensive reading was a must for a writer.

Chapter Two delineates my intensive learning phase after I got the opportunity to move to England on a meagre scholarship of five hundred pounds a year. During the short stay of four-and-half years there, I was finally in a position to test my pulse and ability in the midst of mentally stimulating academic environment. That’s where I learnt the real meaning of the expression - publish or perish. That in turn re-enforced my desire to become a writer even if it involved writing of analytic research theses, reports, or papers.

Chapter Three, the core of this book, highlights key experiences, obstacles, and inter-personal issues that I encountered after I joined the federal bureaucracy in Ottawa. It was here that I did most of my writing and got my fair share of name and fame. Despite the fact that I had to fight for my day-to-day survival, I still managed to spend a little over four decades there by my sheer determination, patience, persistence, and perseverance.

Chapter Four outlines the seven key obstacles that I had to deal with during my tenure at the Bureau. These ranged from inter-personal personality conflicts, criticism about my writing, pressure to write with others, battle to win autonomy, nepotism, stalling, and false promises.

When I joined the Bureau in January 1970, the current wave of automation and computer technology, including the availability of various softwares, had not yet hit us. Since I was not that technical minded, the gradual introduction of machines initially scared me. I dreaded even to touch them.

Chapter Five explains how I embraced the changing technology.

Since anyone working in a highly stressful environment carries several health risks, including a stroke, heart disease, diabetes, etc., I was no exception. The continuing stress contributed to my heart troubles that I explicate in Chapter Six. It all started with a simple angina, and then gradually pushed me to get angioplasty, open-heart surgery requiring triple bypasses, and eventually implantation of four stents to keep my arteries free flowing.

Chapter Seven comprises conclusions along with some cautions and recommendations for those aspiring to pursue a vocation like mine in the bureaucracy. If my suggestions or recommendations can help even a few to avoid some or all of the pitfalls that I went through, I would consider the book a success - it did what it’s intended to do.

Speaking of appendices, Appendix I shows how my work was credited along with my name - not by printing it on the cover page but almost at the end of the ‘Preface’ with added emphasis that the work was conducted under the direction or general direction of ….. . The intention was not to give me any open credit or allow me to handle outside enquiries or comments on my own work. The management rather have me as behind-the-scene worker.

In Appendix II, I focus on the financial loss I incurred due to both inflationary factors and stagnant career for more than three decades. In terms of my life-time earnings, simple calculations show that I lost anywhere between one-hundred-and-fifty to five-hundred thousand dollars.

And, finally in Appendix III, I attach a full list of my publications including reports, published, unpublished, or stalled papers, poems, letters to the editor, and above all, my debut erotic romance fiction released in August 2016.

During my tenure of forty-two years at the Bureau, I was able to write ninety analytic reports and papers - sixty-one of these were officially released as catalogued reports or papers in the Bureau’s flagship publications, including Perspectives on Labour and Income and Canadian Economic Observer.

Chapter One

My humble beginning

In India’s cosmopolitan Capital City of New Delhi, there are many layers of primary and high schools that fit the pockets of all, low to medium to high income families. Those with low incomes can send their children to low-fee government schools with almost bare facilities and amenities and run-of-the mill school curriculum, whereas those with middle and high incomes can send their children, at a personal cost to private schools with not only better facilities and amenities but also extra curricular activities designed for the betterment of students. And finally, families with very high incomes, the so-called upper crust, can even send their children in private boarding schools away from home - schools with much superior live-in facilities, better school curriculum, and well-designed extra indoor and outdoor curricular activities, including a close interaction between teachers and students, better monitoring and mentoring of students, participation in a variety of sports, study-trips or outings. Naturally, children from the latter category are way better educated and likely to be more disciplined, and have better social and other skills.

Overall, children in the private and boarding schools are likely to have a better head start right at the starting point of life than their counterparts attending government schools. For example, the former may be better not only in respect to extra curricular activities, but also in respect to learning and conversing in the English language right from the nursery or the beginning class. In a vast country like India, which is secular and comprises hordes of regional languages, cultures, religions, and diverse economies, the English language is the only language that is not only commonly spoken across all regions, but this also unites the country and facilitates mobility of people looking for jobs from one region to another or help them move abroad. Those who are not well verse in this language limit their chances of progress, including job mobility and its associated financial gains. Speaking and working fluently in the English language is considered as one of the must haves for a student if he/she has to do well in life.

Entry into middle school

I was nine years old in 1950 when I entered class five in a government school - just a walking distance from home. This government subsidised home, located in Lodhi Colony of New Delhi, was a small two room quarter with kitchen and washroom facilities to be shared with four other families of low-paid employees of the government. We were there because my father was a lowly-paid translator with the federal government - translating documents from the national working language Hindi to English or from English to Hindi.

The school I attended had way more students than it could physically accommodate. As a result, a good number of classes were held in the tents placed on one side of the vast open ground of the school. Since no large wooden benches or small individual work-desks for students could be placed under the tent, students were supposed to sit in rows and rows of red with vertical blue striped runners, each about twenty-five feet long and thirty inches wide. Students had to write in their notebooks by placing them on their squatted thighs or bent knees. Since tents were water proof and had wide open sides, students could move freely from one end of the class to another and so could the teacher - come rain or sunshine. The only time the classes had to temporarily move inside the building was when tents couldn’t stand the gusty winds or heavy downpours - especially during the monsoon season, i.e., between the months of July and August.

In this environment, I started to learn the twenty-six letters of the English language. After the letters, came joining of letters to create small words and their meanings depicted by small pictures or caricatures. We had to repeat after the teacher … C…A…T… cat… and then he would point out her picture, or A…P…P…L…E… apple, followed by its picture. Since there was just one English class a day, we learned a few words each day. Each year from class five to eight, we learned the language in steps, its complexity, diversity, sentence structures, grammar, etc. That’s how I learned the English language in a government school.

I remember the English exam I took at the end of class five (the year we started learning this language). One of the questions asked was to Write your full name in English. I couldn’t write the answer. I didn’t know how to spell out my full name as entered by my family member at the time of school registration. I knew my long name, but not its spellings. When I returned home and showed the question paper to my mother, she noted that I hadn’t tick-marked on the question Write your full name in English. She wondered why I hadn’t answered that question. I told her I didn’t know how to spell it out. She was very mad.

You could have simply written RKC (for Rajinder Kumar Chawla), and gotten a mark or two. But now you will get zero because you didn’t write any answer at all. As a ten year old, I felt bad and got over her scolding in the next few days. But, honestly, I have not been able to brush off this incident from my memory.

To high school

I was thirteen years old when we moved from Lodhi Colony to Darya Ganj and I entered the high school named Ramjas Higher Secondary School, No. 1 (the trust that ran this school had four other schools of the same name with different numbers, located in different sections of the city). Starting with class nine, the entire medium of learning changed to English - all books (with the exception of one in Hindi) were in English, teachers’ instructions were in English, and answers to exams were to be written in English. The English language became an intrinsic part of our day-to-day learning process. At this stage, there was no difference between being at a government or a private school as both used English as the language to provide the core education. What still differentiated the systems was the variety of extra curriculum activities that private schools offered and governments’ none or very little.

When I moved to class eleven, the last year of high school, our English teacher mentioned that our school was going to publish a school magazine in English - starting that year. He solicited input from students by emphasizing that articles he was looking for should be short and timely, and not necessarily all that original. As one of the English teachers, he would edit our submissions. When he asked how many of us would be interested to submit an article, I was one among those who raised their hands.

Why did I raise my hand and volunteer to submit an article? I wanted to see my name in print, along with a strong desire to impress my teacher and classmates. I knew that even after I left this school by the end of the current term, I would be leaving my name behind, as the magazine was going to be around for years to come. I wanted my name to fly and stay in the good books of the principal, staff, and the future students.

When I agreed to contribute an article, I had absolutely no clue about the topic I was going to write on - let alone its length, its extent of originality, and so on. When I reached home, I looked up in several books my father (who had done his master’s in History) and uncle (i.e., his brother) had in their collections containing write-ups on hoards of topics. Since World War II had finished not that long ago, I thought the topic War and Peace would do the job. After choosing the topic, I looked around for more and more material relating to this war, all about the bloodshed, number of people killed, injured, and displaced, weaponry used, and how people, including politicians of different nationalities, worked on ending the war to bring peace to the world. After few days, I compiled the relevant material from different sources and placed it under the title War and Peace. There wasn’t much original in it.

I was a bit nervous when I handed the article to our teacher in front of the full class. I also had concerns: what if he asked me questions about the title, its focus, sources used, or possible expansions or reductions, etc. To my great relief, he looked at the title and said publicly that I had chosen a very timely topic, and thanked me for putting it together. I was sure that in his heart he knew that I had nicely put together the material in a short article. He took a quick glance over it and thanked me right away in front of the class. I smiled at him and thanked him, bowed to him, and returned to my seat. I felt proud of my effort. I was finally going to see my name in print in the school magazine before reaching my sixteenth birthday.

I don’t recall that I ever wrote anything original during my school years. Doing regular homework or writing assignments was just a routine affair. It didn’t call for any serious thinking, creativity, novelty, or crafty writing. The only opportunity to do any of such things was in writing an essay on a topic suggested by the English teacher. Indeed, we used to write essays as a part of the curriculum, but these essays were more or less fully dictated or orally narrated by the teacher - making us to simply transform the spoken words into a written format. Perhaps that was the way teachers taught students how to write an essay.

Even at the schools-wide final exam of high school, someone spread the word that we were going to be asked to write an essay on Lord Buddha, his life and teachings. Guess what? English teachers in most of the schools, including ours, dictated the full essay on Lord Buddha. Students simply had to cram it and reproduce it later on the answer sheets. I bet anyone marking the essay would have figured out the similarity of contents in batches of schools because what students had done was just spit out what they had crammed. There was no originality left on which to test the English language skills of high school students. How the system worked in private schools remained a mystery to me as I wasn’t there.

To college affiliated to Delhi University

The situation was no different when I entered the college to complete my bachelor degree. After successfully completing the high school exam, I wanted to continue my favourite subject of chemistry - metallurgical in particular. I wanted to work on alloys of metals, their compositions, and develop some new, if possible. And, for that, I had to move to a special university far away from Delhi.

As poor as we were, my parents couldn’t afford to send me away. Rather, they looked for the cheapest of all fields offering a bachelor degree at home university. As a science student, I couldn’t even pursue a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree in chemistry at Delhi University, because this too was financially beyond their reach. I was pushed to enrol in a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree, with honours in mathematics and economics. I had no clue what this subject of economics was. But who cared? Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Once enrolled in the field of mathematics for three years, there was no opportunity to write anything original. Mathematics is an abstract science. One simply has to answer questions using mostly symbols and letters (mostly Greek, Latin, and English) supplemented by