In the Line of Duty

It is often said in not very loud tones that civil servants in India are neither civil nor servants but uncivil masters. But I had seen a remarkably civil but very effective civil servant albeit a very minor one in the form of a Train Ticket Examiner while commuting in a suburban train in Kolkata. Naihati is a quaint little junction forty kilometres from Sealdah [one of the railway terminals in Kolkata] and the suburban trains usually stop there for a couple of minutes more than the usual start and stop formula in other stations. I was travelling back to my place from Kolkata in a local train and as soon as the train stopped at Naihati a very serious and scholarly looking man in think blackframmed specs and the mandatory black coat boarded the train. There was no doubt that he was upto checking tickets. Little did I know that he was not the usual bribe taking, conniving ticket checker. Nor did I know then that he was not foolish enough to arrest and fine ticketless travellers [ticketless passengers in Kolkata are often violent]. Nonetheless, he carried on his duty in the most unobtrusive but effective way. He placed himself in the middle of the compartment and announced loudly in Bangla "Those who do not have tickets please stand up and allow those with tickets to sit on the seats". Believe you me, there were people who stood up and people who took those vacant seats. By the time I realised what happened, he had moved on to the next compartment. Later I gathered from the murmur around that the man and his style were well known to the regular passengers.
I also gathered that the passengers in this instnace were lucky. For there was another ticket examiner at Naihati who chased ticketless travellers like a mad dog. He was reputed to have jumped the overbridge stairs in order to catch ticketless travellers and broken his limbs a couple of times.
If you think these civil servants were weirdos.... please note that that in the four years that I was in Kolkata and occassionally took local trains to the suburbs, three ticket checkers were pushed out of speeding local trains and two of them had died.
PS: Naihati's claim to fame of course if that it is the birthplace of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee