'Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms.' [16]
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Bureaucracy in India is both a destructive force and a highly refined skill.
- In plain terms
- Indian bureaucracy harms progress but is also a mastered craft.
- What can you take from it?
- Institutional inefficiency can become a cultural specialty.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- When does inefficiency become a skill?
- How do systems reward counterproductive behaviors?
Another view
Calling it an art form may romanticize harmful inefficiency.
More from Shashi Tharoor
'India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is for ever, and India is forever being made.' [16]
Permalink to quote #21 'Like India herself, I am at home in hovels and palaces, Ganapathi, I trundle in bullock-carts and propel myself into space, I read the vedas and quote the law…
Permalink to quote #23 'This is my story of the India I know, with its biases, selections, omissions, distortions, all mine.... Every Indian must for ever carry with him, in his head…
Permalink to quote #20
Related quotes
They have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo - an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as 'India', jus…
Arun ShourieArun Shourie quote #2 I had eleven main concentration camps under my command. From these eleven camps, internees were sent to other so-called labor camps. That was my job. I had not…
Oswald PohlOswald Pohl quote #5 We are dealing with veterans, not procedures -- with their problems, not ours. -- 1947, as Administrator of the U.S. Veterans Administration
Omar BradleyOmar Bradley quote #8