Steel frame them: Childhood bonds must be treasured
New Delhi as youngsters, some of them even before I was born. They are now scattered all over the world, but the flood of memories posted on the group prove that the many decades they spent away from there have not severed the family-like strong bonds forged in that quiet, tree-lined government residential colony.
The invisible but very pervasive «civil service family» network has been one of India's best kept secrets.
Offspring of bureaucrats will vouch that regardless of region or other differentiators, doors open and procedures are speeded up once their civil service backgrounds are conveyed to government functionaries anywhere. But the parallel networks of «sarkari kids» fostered in government colonies in successive generations are actually an even better kept secret.
These bonds are clearly a consequence of long periods of time they spent together as youngsters, just like those forged among children living in colonies whose residents did not have transferable jobs, an occupational hazard of civil servants.
Some in the group spent their entire school and college years in that colony, as their parents were loath to leave the area even for grander accommodation and were also lucky enough not to be transferred back to their home states.
Unless the weather or an irate parent intervened, there were long hours of fun amid those identical double-storeyed government flats ranged around grassy quadrangles.
And as they converged there from all parts of India, that colony was far more diverse than non-sarkari residential areas, a microcosm of India. And even accounting for rose-tinted nostalgia, there was a Malgudi Days type of vibe, reflecting the spartan reality of India from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s.
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