Obsequiousness

When you visit the Foreign registration office in Bangalore for the second time to "get the signatures", you visit one Mr. Muthanna. He sits in his all-blue office in front of an absolutely hilarious floor-to-ceiling poster of some Swiss Alps or Maroon Bells.
The whole poster is faded from sunlight, and since there is no sunlight in this room, it must astonishingly old. Or the air is particularly oxidizing in there.

As I sat there for an hour waiting yesterday, I got to observe one of the remainders of the old British Raj days: obsequiousness.

The Police Station on Infantry Road is full of people standing around doing essentially nothing. That's not special in India though. There are folks in fancy hats standing with rifles from the 1940's. There are the obligatory 5 gentlemen at the gate who are waiting to blow their whistles at the traffic.

What is special is the man who keeps order outside the office of Mr. Muthanna. This poor chap is dressed in a police uniform, but for all intents and purposes is a doorman.

Over the course of an hour, he opened the doors 10 times. Each time some bureaucrat would leave the office next to Muthanna, he would jump up, step to the side, and open the door to Muthanna's office. Now this door is actually a pair of swinging saloon shutters. The pair of doors hasn't seen soap or paint in 50 years. It's covered in hand-filth. And yet, he opens them each time as if it's a solemn duty and honor to do so.

In addition to opening doors during my hour of observation, he saluted entering and exiting "officials", and opened the doors to their cars. All in a particularly submissive fashion.

He carries no weapon so he can't possibly be there for "security".

At one point, he even picked up the doormats and shook them out against the pillars of the building, creating a nice cloud of dust appreciated "cough, cough" by all the people waiting outside. Now, I've been in India long enough to know that cleaning floors is not something someone like him would normally do. It's just "below" them so to speak. You hire people to do that. But do it he did...

I'm left with the impression that this poor fellow worked like crazy through school to "get a good government job". He probably even paid a bribe to get in, a bribe he borrowed money for and is still paying off. He gets up every morning and puts on a police uniform, tells his kids he's going out to catch bad guys.

And then he starts work as doorman.