I have now decided to take some responsibility and write this down. It is not going to be a regular blog, I have tried it before and have met with failure. Neither am I promising it to be weekly, but perhaps monthly. I am going to write this as a run up to my third attempt at the UPSC - what one such Professor at JNU said about: the Unpredictable Public Service Commission.
For the uninitiated, this is one of the harder nuts to crack as and when anybody in their 20's decides to take it up. I say it out of experience, and mainly because this examination refuses to exhibit any semblance of a pattern. If you tried plotting a graph of the qualifiers in every round of this exam (there are 3 rounds to this..yes) , you would at best come up with a scatter diagram that could hardly give a trend as it were.
I have spent 2 glorious years of my 20's preparing for this examination and have not succeeded. Although at that point it made me sad because my hard work seemed to have been futile, I must say after having joined work I was very quickly able to see the existential aspect of this examination-the truth be told...there is never any exit. If you have gone into this once, and done it purely and entirely for your self (not for your parents, peer pressure or anything extraneous like that) in all likelihood, you are going to want to do it again, until you reach that point of no return.
Many of us when we are young dont spend much time on thinking of more philosophical questions which infact are answered in our Gita - we often find those reading such texts as boring and lost for better food for thought-but the truth is that sometimes these texts have a wisdom that many dont have the patience to unravel. As I read the Gita, Arjun's dilemmas are similar to mine, his concentration often wavering like mine and advice from Krishna is infact a solution.
My 2 years spent solely on this preparation in many ways left me uncertain. Today I work in the development sector and I feel more confident that I will be able to perhaps take up this preparation and perhaps even clear some rounds...but if I dont, I am not the loser, because my job is there and I will just move on.
The mantra as I believe to have learnt out of my experience is to not read a single extra text. One has to re read the same thing again and again until every bone in your body screams it out almost like a parrot. Think strategically, but never read too many books. Just the few standard text books.
I do not know at this stage if this is going to work for me. Probably it will, perhaps it wont, but only time can tell. In the meanwhile the Civil services is just a means for me and not the end. I sincerely wish to work for the people, and I have met and heard people in the villages who know no better, speaking to me of their problems, hoping that I would be able to get them electricity, perhaps a small healthcare centre or a bus to take their women to the clinics, or just write of them, about them and let the world know they exist...the trust that they repose so easily is one that must be respected.
I wish and hope that someday I am able to make that difference.
The target is the blessed year of 2013 and in the meanwhile trying to finish as much in the form of collated notes every month.
I have already started reading Bipin Chandra's India After Independence and am enjoying it very much. I will do this and some portions from Vajirams' Yellow Books for chronology. This should suffice for my mains as well as Prelims.
My reasons for writing things down this time round are many but one for certain as you may have guessed is to keep me on track. Fingers forever crossed!
For the uninitiated, this is one of the harder nuts to crack as and when anybody in their 20's decides to take it up. I say it out of experience, and mainly because this examination refuses to exhibit any semblance of a pattern. If you tried plotting a graph of the qualifiers in every round of this exam (there are 3 rounds to this..yes) , you would at best come up with a scatter diagram that could hardly give a trend as it were.
I have spent 2 glorious years of my 20's preparing for this examination and have not succeeded. Although at that point it made me sad because my hard work seemed to have been futile, I must say after having joined work I was very quickly able to see the existential aspect of this examination-the truth be told...there is never any exit. If you have gone into this once, and done it purely and entirely for your self (not for your parents, peer pressure or anything extraneous like that) in all likelihood, you are going to want to do it again, until you reach that point of no return.
Many of us when we are young dont spend much time on thinking of more philosophical questions which infact are answered in our Gita - we often find those reading such texts as boring and lost for better food for thought-but the truth is that sometimes these texts have a wisdom that many dont have the patience to unravel. As I read the Gita, Arjun's dilemmas are similar to mine, his concentration often wavering like mine and advice from Krishna is infact a solution.
My 2 years spent solely on this preparation in many ways left me uncertain. Today I work in the development sector and I feel more confident that I will be able to perhaps take up this preparation and perhaps even clear some rounds...but if I dont, I am not the loser, because my job is there and I will just move on.
The mantra as I believe to have learnt out of my experience is to not read a single extra text. One has to re read the same thing again and again until every bone in your body screams it out almost like a parrot. Think strategically, but never read too many books. Just the few standard text books.
I do not know at this stage if this is going to work for me. Probably it will, perhaps it wont, but only time can tell. In the meanwhile the Civil services is just a means for me and not the end. I sincerely wish to work for the people, and I have met and heard people in the villages who know no better, speaking to me of their problems, hoping that I would be able to get them electricity, perhaps a small healthcare centre or a bus to take their women to the clinics, or just write of them, about them and let the world know they exist...the trust that they repose so easily is one that must be respected.
I wish and hope that someday I am able to make that difference.
The target is the blessed year of 2013 and in the meanwhile trying to finish as much in the form of collated notes every month.
I have already started reading Bipin Chandra's India After Independence and am enjoying it very much. I will do this and some portions from Vajirams' Yellow Books for chronology. This should suffice for my mains as well as Prelims.
My reasons for writing things down this time round are many but one for certain as you may have guessed is to keep me on track. Fingers forever crossed!
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