Non-Fiction
Foreign Office Follies and Foibles
There was a time when I thought of taking up diplomacy as a career. To tell the truth, I did a lot of soul searching before deciding that I would quit being a lecturer in the Department of Public Administration, Dhaka University, and take up a position in the country's higher civil service. But I decided to take the civil service examination, and ended up as a Foreign Service officer in 1979. Correction; I was first a probationer, and, on completion of the necessary formalities, the real thing. So, I first worked as a probationer with no specific duties, but a lot of getting-acquainted-with-the-foreign- office-and-its-senior-officers routine, interspersed with lounging around with fellow probationers, and, then, on confirmation to the service, as a desk officer in the International Organization division.
To be honest, I did not work that much, or that long, at the Foreign Ministry. Before I could barely rub the dust off my chair, I, along with a batch mate, was packed off in 1980 to get an MALD degree at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy , USA. Some of the Tufts University undergraduates would call it The Lecher School of Flaw and Duplicity. I rather liked this depiction of the august school! On the completion of my degree requirements, like a cad, I sent in my letter of resignation from the service, having decided that the 8:00 to 2:00 (as the office hours were then) grind was not for me. So, you see, my actual stint in the service was short and sweet -- for the most part. There were sour moments, too, maddening, frustrating, irritating -- oh, boy, had I stayed the course, just think how compounded those moments would have become! But the sweet moments would have been compounded, too! Oh well, you can't have it all good all the time, now, can you?
For me, though, being in the Foreign Office meant being periodically yanked out of my regular desk job to work as a protocol officer on several state and other important foreign visits. My director was not too happy about that, though, and even lodged complaints a couple of times with the appropriate higher-ups about his officer being taken away when he should have been performing onerous duties pertaining to specific aspects of relations between Bangladesh and certain international organizations, but to no avail. I did not complain. I enjoyed being yanked away from the daily chore of putting up files! Actually, my several getaways as a protocol officer began when I was a probationer.
So I remember being a glorified accessory (wallpaper, more like it!) to a visiting West German Education Minister, to the far more interesting celebrated actress Liv Ullmann, who, if I recall correctly, was a goodwill ambassador of some UN agency, to being there at the airport when the super hush-hush visit of Egyptian Vice President Hosni Mubarak took place for a few precious and ultra-security-ridden hours during a time when the Muslim world was not too kindly disposed towards the recent normalization of relations between Cairo and Tel Aviv, and feeling important that I was part of some great national and international scheme of things. The old ego felt a whole lot pampered, all right! As did the old stomach with some choice gastronomic fare! But you still had to put up with some bumptious officials who took being self-important too seriously. They really rubbed you the wrong way, but, fortunately, their numbers were small enough not to arouse disgust for the entire service.
Then there was that day when I had to do protocol duty on a national mourning day precisely to appropriately honour the dearly departed for whom the day was being observed. Senior Minister Mashiur Rahman (Jadu Miah) had died, and an obituary book had been opened on the Foreign Ministry premises for foreign diplomats to pay their homage. The ministry needed a protocol officer to receive them, and guide them to the book, and, by now, you might have guessed the identity of the person the higher authorities chose to be the sacrificial goat! For once, I hated having been selected, to be on constant alert from morning till afternoon, and, that too, without any food! How revolting! And so, at different intervals, I solemnly greeted (and was I rigorously solemn, while masking my intense irritation -- I must have realized my considerable acting potential then!) a stream of ambassadors, high commissioners, charges d'affaire, and other diplomats, who, after expressing their sorrow at our country's great loss, went on to record their feelings in the obituary book. Inwardly I would muse, just how many of them actually felt what they said and wrote, and wondered if the dark sunglass-wearing Soviet ambassador was not really a KGB agent. With his bald pate and lean hard features, to go along with the glasses, he certainly looked like one! He would have made the perfect spook against Sean Connery's 007. By the time he arrived, I was in a foul mood. By the time it all ended, I was in a villainous mood.
Then there were the state visits, where I would be basking in a self-imposed delusion of grandeur at being the protocol officer to the second in order of hierarchy (his name escapes me) to Gen. Ne Win of Burma (now Myanmar) who was on the state visit, the Foreign Minister of Nepal, when King Birendra was making the state visit, and the Indian foreign secretary, Jagat Mehta, when Prime Minister Morarji Desai was on a state visit, in, if memory serves me right, reverse order of visitation. You can discern that I was gradually elevated in importance of protocol duty, from being the officer attached to a mere foreign secretary to the august personage of the second man in the government, no less! Ah, I must have done some good to have deserved such promotion of sorts!
Those were heady days of pompous entourage rides during state occasions, gastronomic delight at the state guest house, where we the Foreign Service officers reigned, more familiar Mughlai dinners (and decidedly losing out to the state guest house in the quality of cuisine) at Bangabhavan, where the President's ADCs reigned, and we felt miserable, to be inevitably followed by a feeling of despondency when the visits ended, at the dreaded prospect of going back to the drudgery of moving files.
The Indian visit was interesting. First, an overly concerned and overbearing senior officer gave me a dressing down for having the temerity to sit in the back seat with Jagat Mehta. No matter how much I explained that the foreign secretary had insisted that I sit by him, he was not mollified ("you should have told him that it was not the pucca thing to do," or something to that effect). The upshot was that I got to sit at the back with not just Mehta, but also the Nepalese and Burmese dignitaries every time we traveled! And then there was the rather rummy episode involving Couto and Medhekar (as far as I can recall, both were joint secretaries to the government, or, maybe, one was, and the other an additional secretary). The two had been assigned one car, and, on one occasion, some official function had been arranged one afternoon for the delegation. Some of the protocol officers were not required to attend. So I lounged around the guest house when I heard Mr. Medhekar yelling blue murder. I related the essence of what happened to (probably) my batch mate Mahmud Hassan (later secretary-equivalent ambassador), who had also come to investigate the commotion:
"Well," I said, "in a nutshell, Couto to futo, aar Medhekar ka chitkar." Couto had taken the car to the function, leaving his colleague behind! "I can quite understand his agitation."
And then off to Fletcher (or Lecher). One of the perks of studying there was to be able to cross-register courses at Harvard University. I duly did so, and one bitterly cold winter evening, I was making my way to the John F. Kennedy School library. As I was about to enter through the gate, a hand fell on my shoulder with a simultaneous "keysey ho bete" (how are you, son?) directed at me from someone with a pronounced whiskey breath. I turned to stare at the face of Jagat Mehta! He had come to the United States as a research fellow or scholar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Shahid Alam is currently Head, Media and Communication department, Independent University, Bangladesh.
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