Mostly, if you're a city reporter, which is where most journalists start, you end up shuttling from onion prices in Seemapuri slums to water crisis in Jwalapuri tenements. If you're lucky, as beginners have become now, you could cover an election a year. Which means Sushma Swaraj will be nice toyou and Sheila Dixit will be nicer, but that, even with the kind of political instability we've had, doesn't happen too often.

Not surprisingly, after a few years, every reporter feels it's time to move out and go to the bureau. Which is where the really glamorous stuff is supposed to happen: national politics. It's difficult to understand, but it appears that there is nothing as irresistible as covering party shenanigans and Parliament proceedings. I suspect it's the samosas that party press conferences offer and the lunch the Parliament canteen serves (very reasonable and much better than what your mundu can rustle up).

As you can imagine, bureau beats such as Science and Technology, Railways or even Human Resource Development don't have too many takers. In these days of inflated ambition, even the junkets they yield are meagre. After all, when foreign junkets are on offer, who would want to get a free ride on a Shatabdi? After all, is covering a Science Congress at some university campus really thecoolest thing to do?

As for my own recently-acquired beat, Human Resource Development, I can tell why no one wants much to do with it. It usually involves travelling to Shastri Bhavan, beating peak hour traffic, once a day, trying to meet joint secretaries and secretaries who seem to be in a permanent state of meetings. To give them their due, the mounds of paper they generate seem to justify their preoccupation. You can tell the importance of an officer and sometimes even a minister (and his private secretary) by the piles of files he/she has to clear.

As far as the Human Resource Development Ministry is concerned (which covers education, culture, youth and sports affairs, women and child development) the paper it generates could solve the newspaper world's newsprint crisis. Take education alone. It has 10 joint secretaries who deal with all manner of portfolios: from elementary education to university education, from adult education to policy/planning. Added to this is the committees that each sectionseems to attach to itself and you can imagine the reports that line the shelves of information officers attached to each ministry.

Do they ever end up being implemented? As a joint secretary wisely remarked to me the other day, good recommendations are meant to remain just that. What would government presses do without the committee culture? What would professional experts, in fact, do without the ministries and their need to answer every crisis with a task force or a high powered panel? What for that matter would journalists like me do without them? And the cups of tea that hospitable information officers serve while you cool your heels waiting for some joint secretary to give you the time of day between affixing his signature on a file with one hand and taking a call from another. Thank God for ministers such as Murli Manohar Joshi who keep travelling.