Word: servants
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hendrikus Johannes Witteveen, 56, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, is the most enigmatic international civil servant since the days of Dag Hammarskjeid, the mystic who died in a plane crash while serving as Secretary-General of the United Nations. An economist by training, Witteveen always carries a pocket calculator, which he whips into action during esoteric discussions of international finance. A strict adherent of the obscure Sufi religious cult,* Witteveen, despite the intense pressures of his job, finds time to meditate every morning and evening. He sees no conflict between the practice of the dismal science...
They made their move in the middle of the night, almost apologizing for their coup. Shortly before 2 o'clock last Tuesday morning, a group of officers descended on the Prime Minister's residence in Rawalpindi. "Sir, the troops have come," a servant advised Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The Prime Minister took the news stoically, gathered his wife and children on the lawn of the official residence, had coffee and ordered his bags packed. He then moved to the Governor's Mansion in the nearby hill resort of Murree, some 30 miles away. Behind padlocked iron...
Both are, in fact, a little dotty, to the delight of their native servant Ibrahim. Constantly being fired by the colonel and rehired by the Memsahib, Ibrahim cherishes Tusker's curses and colorful tirades ("I'll have both their guts for garters!") and repeats them to himself for days afterward. An unabashed Anglophile, he even admires the way his employers age. "The English," he thinks, "once they began falling physically apart, did so with all their customary attention to detail, as if fitting themselves in advance for their own corpses to make sure they were going...
WIDERBERG provides two compelling portraits of men of flawed character behind the socially acceptable role of public servant. One is Lt. Hult, the victim's sidekick, a vicious bully who proudly wears his uniform on his day off. The other is the Commissioner, who presents a slick media image but is completely ineffective when presented with the crisis that ends the film. Both are scoundrels, but they are also cops, which blinds most people to their failings. Widerberg will have no such nonsense, and therein lies the strength of Man on the Roof...
...wrote V.S. Naipaul, the West Indian novelist (Guerrillas, A House for Mr. Biswas) of East Indian heritage, after his first visit to India in 1962. And so it seemed. He visited the ravaged village in Uttar Pradesh from which his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as an indentured servant more than 60 years before, and fled in horror. He raged and fussed about the Indian bureaucracy. He was appalled by the emaciated bodies and starving dogs, by the filth and public defecation. He was exasperated by the religiosity and pretense of "a nation ceaselessly exchanging banalities with itself...