why Indian parents want their children to become civil servants

Mimetic Desires and Social Expectations of Cracking IAS.

Dearest gentle reader,

Has it ever occurred to you what it feels like—or even means—to live freely? Despite all our personal privileges, are we truly free? Is anyone really free?

These are the kinds of questions I thought through today as I traversed through the wide alleys of Central Delhi, getting drenched in the rain, escaping getting hit by ever-speeding cars, and slowing down to think if my friction-less chappals would slip and the white pants would get muddy. Upon reaching the metro station, I was in a long queue of passengers huddling through the security maze.

After all this, I am left wondering, are we truly free? Perhaps this is a question of privilege—a privilege I may have struggled to ask all my life. But, a privilege nonetheless…

When I was young, my parents told me to study well, or else there was no option except to graze the buffaloes like my village peers. Boy, a study I did. I joined a school where I could grab a full scholarship to study. Since my parents could not educate themselves enough, they wanted me to study hard. That is all the desires they had. Ah, a little more than that!

They wanted me to become a civil servant. An (Indian Administrative Service) IAS officer, so to speak, or as they colloquially termed it, a district collector. However, I dreamt of being one until I really did not. I did not know what it meant to start with when I wanted to be that. And I very well knew what it meant when I didn’t want to be that.

Every once in a while, my father eloquently puts it, despite all his failed persuasions to get me to prepare for the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) Exam, “We gave you all this education so that you travel in a government car, with laal batti (loosely translated as read beacon)”. (Trust me, I have often told him that these vehicles no longer carry a red beacon.)

Beneath all these desires lie a certain notion of power, prestige, and respect. Why, I often ask myself! Is this desire something society created for us? Is it a failure of our society that perpetually wants to maintain a system of hierarchy (where bureaucracy is the state, the state is the god-like, and citizenry is just subjects)?

Millions of children are put through a system of education, a system of examination, overtly telling them that they are not good enough until they really make it. Millions more are in a coaching system that suck their life out every day. Why does our education system not allow us all to be individually self-sustaining? Why does it compel us to chase a certain system of examinations? Are we all just in a maze through which the Government finds excuses to create jobs?

Or are we all just so enamoured by the state that our sense of citizenship arises from our own escape from thinking like a subject? Are we merely trying to escape subjecthood through our becoming a state, through IAS?

Is it an aspirational element of trying to escape poverty, the life we are living, and practising a sense of belief that IAS alone is a respectable job? Or is it just an amalgamation of all this?

As I grew through my bachelor’s and entered my master’s at Delhi University, I sensed a quiet discomfort in the thought that I could study for UPSC. Part of the blame must go to the kinds of things I read at the University. I sensed the kinds of structures that existed and realised that I would not want to get entangled in the maze of the desire machine that is IAS.

Reading Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, and Foucault, I sensed that the world could be different. And the world we live in is our own making.

If we have already created a world like this, can we make it differently by asking different questions? This is something I began grappling with.

Thanks to the environment I was brought up in, with barely anyone asking questions, it always put an onus upon me to read more. But my environment is also not very conducive to everything I am discussing.

I doubt if my parents fully understand—and appreciate (for I thoroughly appreciate their concerns that they cannot afford their 27-year-old son to speak philosophically about transcending worldly mimetic desires)—what it means to do a PhD. But somehow, I have made my peace with it.

Even if I were to win a Nobel Prize, my father would be dismayed that his well-educated son (who studied God-knows-what) did not even bother to write this UPSC exam even once. So, to his friends, my father would begrudgingly complain: “Look, if he had written the exam once, he would have surely cleared it.”

Why is there a constant urge to do UPSC in our societies? What does it say about our societies, in general?

Photo by Aejaz Memon on Unsplash

Since our independence, bureaucracy has remained a system that is aloof from social realities in a manner of living through social realities. What do I mean by it?

Even as an IAS officer administers Indian societal units, they have often looked at society as consisting of subjects—of beings that need to be controlled. One part of the problem is thanks to colonial subjecthood (a kind of Foucauldian governmentality). And another is our inability to ask questions. Our inability as a society to encourage a thriving environment is doing so. How do I justify this?

Go to a local police station and see what the village households think of police stations. In many Indian households, going to a police station or a court meeting would be seen as succumbing to their honour. The police are not just a representation of power, but their reinforcer. The stick-carrying police (as often portrayed in Indian movies) or a recurring innuendo of a bureaucratic clerk swamped with paperwork are all products of the state machinery. State power hangs on its postcolonial subjects.

While there is a discomfort about the state power, there is also a great deal of desire to get hold of that power. The state, through the mechanism of conducting UPSC and bureaucracy exams each year, has created a machinery of desires. Since there is an overlaying structure of ruler and subject, the social classes (both rich and poor) attach bureaucracy to a supreme value.

The Neta-Babu (politician-bureaucrat) nexus of the elitism of class hierarchy has created mimetic desires among Indian social classes. It is a mechanism for the people living in poverty and the middle classes to escape their subjecthood and establish their citizenry. It is a mechanism through which they attain importance, and their lives are worth living. Therefore, becoming an IAS officer becomes a mimetic desire.

As French philosopher René Girard puts it, one desires something because somebody else desires it. But I go a little further and argue that one desires something because society desires that thing. Elsewhere, Girard writes:

Man is a creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.

I would also invoke Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze to make a case that desire itself is a product of capitalism. But that would drag me to write another essay like this one. Also, I have forgotten what they had to say about desire anyway. So, let’s stick to Rene Girard!

There is another twist to this tale. Perhaps, we are also always driven by what others think of our decisions. For my father: “What would I tell others that my son/daughter is doing?” “Humanities?” “At 27?” “That thing isn’t going to get them a job!” “Ah, they are working?” “Nah, that isn’t good enough.” “That isn’t a government job, right?” “You aren’t too sure how long your fortunes will last.”

For the society: “More importantly, doing a Humanities—and not doing an IAS.” “That is quite a bummer!” “What would other people think?” “That they are not simply good enough?” “Maybe they are not particularly smart enough to crack the exam!” “Oh, maybe they are too lazy!”

What others (in society at large) expect us to do—and our ability to achieve them—determines our self-worth. Becoming an IAS brings social prestige and surplus to an Indian community. A community desires that someone in their community become an IAS. It brings with it a sense of self-worth. But why?

Was the sense of self-worth ever lost in the first place? I don’t know. It may just be that we are fed to be worthy members of society by our social circles. Being an IAS, I suggest here, is the highest level of one’s ascribed worthiness in the Indian society as we live it.

If our worth is attained through what becomes of you, are you really free? We are always chasing what others want us to do. We often want to do something because others have done so. And we may also often do something because we must do something.

Doing something is a part of the puzzle. It is a mechanism that holds societies in a fix. Doing something also intuitively controls us, in ways we don’t yet know and fully appreciate. What we do defines us. What we do allows us to feel free. But are we really truly free? I don’t know!

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NOTE: I first published this essay on my blog almost two years ago on August 13, 2023. However, this essay has stayed with me, so I'm posting it here for you to read, if you haven’t already.

I have just edited this for clarity. And if you resonate with any of this, feel free to share it with others :)

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