Down Bureaucracy Lane: An Exposé of a Pakistani Bureaucrat

Description

Talat Rahim has not endeared herself with the civil service by writing “Down Bureaucracy Lane”. A pithy account of her more than two decades of working with the government of Pakistan, this book is a damning incrimination of the Byzantine world of the civil service conducted within Pakistan.

The book makes it clear, and painfully so, that the development of tourism never had any priority either with the corporation or the ministry of tourism in Pakistan.

Ministers, secretaries, managing directors, the entire blighted lot, were in it either because they thought they would get access to women of easy virtue, or for the freebies to foreign tourism fairs.

Down Bureaucracy Lane reveals sordid tales of how Pakistan conducted its annual tourism fairs abroad. While neighboring country, India, always sent its finest mid-level tourism professionals, more often than not Pakistan’s sorry stall was manned by fat-bellied ministers and federal secretaries.

It is almost as if there is some invidious plot to make Pakistan fail to attract visitors to its exotic shores.

Pakistanis, the general hard-working, resilient public in position to steer this country to better shores, are evidently kept away from homeland’s matters requiring grave concern.

Down Bureaucracy Lane is a sarcastically sad, yet full of witty stories from beginning till the end, stories comprising of how “not to run a government department”.

The cream of author’s funny crop is, “They say old bureaucrats never die, they just waste away. Or perhaps they sign on for the fast track to senile dementia.”

This is one such book that should be read to acknowledge how the taxpayers` money in Pakistan is brutally squandered.