Me and Kaka

Purely out of interest, I decided to meet with a manager at Bank of India, who was admittedly only the stand-in for the actual head of Agricultural Finance of the Bank's Maharashtra branch. For purposed of anonymity, I will just refer to him as Kaka (Marathi word for Uncle).
I'm always amazed by how tiny a city Pune actually is. What looked on the map as a pretty good distance took me about 10 minutes in a rickshaw. So I was left to kill an hour outside the bank. Just my luck, there was nothing to do around there. Except walk, and walk, and walk, and I did. I think I walked around the entire city. And for some reason, on that particular day, I couldn't find ONE chai stall.
Anyways, back to the story. First of all, I trudge in to this bank, kinda sweaty from my hourlong chai-search. I did wear a collared shirt ...but on jeans. I had my backpack on, and even on a particularly unshaven day, I look 20 at best. So its understandable that this guy was not overly interested in giving me the time of day.
With that said, Kaka was the quintessential government employee. Hardly making eye contact with me, he shuffled papers back and forth on his desk to look busy, and made me wait a couple minutes at an adjoining desk. Then, when he was ready for me, he shuffled over. I think 'shuffle' is a good word for everything he did. Even his speaking was..shuffly.
Unlike others who I've spoken to in the field, Kaka answered each of my questions- intentionally open-ended- with curt answers. His suspicion was not hidden very well, he looked at my notepad with the kind of regard a US Immigration officer would give to a beard.
The conversation was largely disappointing, and it would be unfair for me to make any significant conclusions or generalization about Bank policy from it. However, the recurrent theme from the conversation which I managed to drag out for about 30 minutes, was that the bank basically executes policy from above- the RBI. There were some significant contradictions- on one hand, he said that there was no role for NGO's or groups closer the ground for determining agricultural finance policy- experts in the bank could handle it. On the other hand, he said the rural branches, and even local/state branches, did not determine criteria for loans/funding, but rather simply carried out central policy. Confusing, to say the least.
At the end of our conversation, as I offered him a smile, he finally figured out that I was no threat, and even extended an invitation for me to come 'whenever I wanted to ask more questions.'
Good touch, Kaka.

-Nikhil