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There were six of them.
In one single room.
Statics tell you that if six people have appeared for the UPSC Interview, at least 2 will make it.
That is because the commission calls 3 people for the personality test for every 1 vacancy.
A certain disquiet prevailed in the Secretary, Rural Development’s chamber.
The result was about to come that day. Any moment now.
“Koi mar gaya kya. ” (Is someone dead) Why do you all look so harried?, asked the secretary.
They all had expressionless faces, with their hands under the table on their mobile phones refreshing ForumIAS.
“Mera hua?” ( Did I get through ? ), One of them asked his neighbour, with the facial expression of a man who was about to have his whole life trajectory change in the following minutes.
“No”, the neighbour collugue nodded.
“Tera hua?” ( Did you make it?), he asked again in whispers.
“No.”
“Kisi ka hua?” ( Did anyone get through ? ) he asked looking around the room.
“Nahi.” ( No )
A dead silence followed.
The kind you have in Dholpur House during your personality test when the board speaks nothing but their expression tells you that they arent going to take you in.
“Sir, inlog ka UPSC ka result hai aaj.” ( Sir these people have their UPSC Interview today ) Said the steno to the Secretary as he brought in the files in the conference room with a freezing temperature.
“Take a break for today then. And tomorrow. I will see you on Monday. You will need time.” said the Secretary dismissing us, as he walked out picking up a file.
It wasn’t anyone’s first Interview. In fact it was everyone’s 2nd, 3rd or 4rth Interview.
Statistically, more than 2 should have qualified in the final list. And yet a statistical impossibility had just happened – for none of them had made it.
The Mains result usually takes 3 days to sink in.
The negative mains result.[@@@]
Its been more than 3 months now that the mains results came. And for me, this is yet to sink in.
For this year, like every year while I have a few thousand success stories, I also have some of my most favourite students not make the cut.[#####]
I have had a writer’s block ever since, and words fail me, which is why it took me a whole 4 months to write something.
My team tells me, people expect a prelims post right now, but I cannot do that until I have this off my chest.
Because that day, there were six defeated souls, a Secretary to Govt of India, and steno in that room filled with awkward, hopeless silence.
And they had tears down our eyes when this happened – contained between the pupils lest the Secy saw them cry.
You are usually in your mid or late 20s or early 30s when you reach 3+ or 4+ attempts.
And the results of the Civil Services exam often has impact beyond your career.
Sometimes, it changes the entire trajectory of your life – not just your future job, but future location, and a future partner.
It did. For all of them.
Looking back, I still have a sense of disbelief as to how out of 6 people who appeared for the Interview not even one qualified in the final list that year – almost statistically impossible.
When we sign up for the exam, remember that we accept – nay – embrace this uncertainty.
To not do so, would be stupidity madness.
#1 uncertainty is a part of our evolution.
A lot of people think that UPSC is unpredictable.
They are not entirely incorrect. But this unpredictableness and instability is a part of evolution
As I moved away from my early 30s to late 30s, looking back, I realise that uncertainty is a part of your 20s.
When you are in your 20s, the people with whom you studied in school and college – you will see them change tracks – in career, talent and marriages!
The topper of the school will be fallen hero. – writing SSC exam while a 6 or 7 pointer like you is thinking of IAS.
The ugly duckling of the class is a diva while the handsome-most boy from school has gained so much weight his face has changed.
All UPSC does is to move you from the uncertainty of chaos of your 20s to the chaos of uncertainty.
It is a matter of degree and not kind.
The uncertainty is real. Even outside the UPSCverse.
Before you are able to figure it out, the 20s will take you through heartbreaks, cheating partners and poker/ food addiction/ videogames / porn / social media / procrastination and what not.
Not to mention hair-fall.
And excessive sleepiness when it is exam time.[### folks in North India would know. April and May remain the most sleepy months in one’s preratauon journey – exactly the two months you need to finally shape up your prelims preparation.
And then you spend your 30s realising that your body isn’t the same. The same diet that kept you fine and going, now makes you fat, unhealthy, slow. And the hairfall gets worse, unless you are blessed with those genes.
And while 20s kept you sleepy, you can’t get sleep in your 30s!
The junk that you ate in 20s also comes to haunt you in your 30s.
Then there is the pressure of marriage, performance of work, settling down, career and sometimes aging parents – pulling you in difference directions – so much so that you aren’t really left with a direction of your own.
Before you realise, and respond to emerging realities – the 30s is gone.
I am told that 40s gets much worse with dropped energies, better mental acumen, but worse physical acumen, as if the % of life in each cell of your body has fallen. You have trouble getting up, have inflammation and spend up to 2 days in a month attending funerals.
The generation above you fades into oblivion, if not death. And you see your heroes fall.
Your parents weaken and the elders who your admired , respected and felt safe under – start to fall one by one.
Most people lose their parents in their 40s – if not in their late 30s – something that you can never prepare for.
And by heroes, I do not just mean the heroes that we see in our Mom, Dad, successful uncles and elders in the family.
I also mean the heroes of movies, sitcoms and TV series.
As youngsters, my generation grew up watching Friends, and there was nothing more painful than seeing the friends reunion.
What looked like perfect friendship on TV was masked by decades of not talking to each other. Mathew Perry even died a lonely death.
The friends reunion taught us that friendships of 20s aren’t really real.
The harsh truth is that the people you spend time with right now, you may not speak to some of them ever again in your life as life will grow around you and will get busier.
The popular actor Shahrukh Khan whom I grew up watching – is struggling to stay relevant while Amir Khan has probably hung his boots. Arnold Schwarzenegger is gone from limelight and even Keanu Reeves looks old.
The Matrix Resurrection that you waited almost 2 decades for, is not worth watching as you see your heroes collapse.
In short, things that you don’t want to happen end up happening – sometimes for no fault of yours.
#3 Your relative marks is more important than the actual marks
A kid once asked me – Sir do MGP / test series marks co-relate with UPSC Mains marks. And then shared some social media posts where some users had commented how the two marks totally diverge.
The truth is, the marking scheme of that year makes a lot of difference.
Because while all papers are equal, some papers are more equal than the others.
So for instance in prelims a score of 80 is very cool in 2023 but that marks in 2024 means you have missed prelims cut off by more than 10 marks.
So what is a good score in a test series or UPSC? It depends on the paper.
Similarly, a score of 133+ is super cool to ensure getting into a top 200 ranks in CSE 2023, but even Rank 1,2,3,4,5 of CSE 2017 have scored less than 100 marks in Ethics – and it doesn’t mean they are any less ethical than someone with a high score.
Or a GS paper 3 marks of 100 was almost unachievable for past 3 years ( Rank 1, CSE 2022 has a score of 88 , Rank 1, CSE 2023 has a score of 95 ). But Rank 1 of CSE 2017 & 2018 had 136 and 117 in GS 3. ) So the same score of one year does not mean the same position in a subsequent year. Which is why speculations like – I am expecting 130+ paper 4 and 110+ in GS 1 are off the mark. You can only speak in reference to the how well a paper went, assume a marking reference of the previous year.
#4 Work on yourself. Not just answer writing skills
No matter how the paper went, the only choice you have is either quit the exam process – for the trials and tribulations of the exam process may not be worth it. Specially quit if it comes to a cost of your long term mental health.
But by God’s grace if you do not, work on your content.
There are three facets to answer writing, they occur in a progression.
The first is having the right content that answers the question. Not having this means you cannot compensate for it by drwaing diagrams, examples and quotes ( though you can try – and sometimes trying is all you can do )
I meet kids every other day saying how unhappy they are because the person checking their copy has not told them how to make diagrams and flowcharts – whereas the person who has checked her copy has clearly written – “address the question.”
#5 Value addition follows after the basic content, not before.
Look, it was we guys who had pushed for value addition for scoring ultra high in Mains.
And the reason was when we started in 2016 offline, we got people who had written the mains before – even qualified, but wanted to solve a very specific problem – improving their scores to get single digit or under 50 ranks so that they could get IAS.
In short, rank improvement folks.
And the easiest way to do it was to ensure that they worked on two aspects – one was presentation and the other was value addition.
Looking back, we would have Rank 1,3,5,7,10 etc in Top 10 from a handful of 200 students who joined us.
But the truth is – that led a lot of unprepared and underprepared folks to work on valyue addition without doing the basics. And thanks to Youtube, its a kind of pandemic now.
The second problem that we as mentors face, is someone who hasnt addressed a direct question on land reforms or food processing and wants inputs on value addition and digaram making to fetch more marks.
And going by the trend, the commission is seriously penalising too much data and facts without adressing the question at hand.
#6 Presentation is Queen, but content remains king
Once you have the answer to the question, presentation is the icing on the cake.
Remember, while presentation skills have a multiplier effect on your score, the base on which the multiplication happens in the content. And zero multiplied by 1000 is zero. Zilch. Shunya.
In the end , you eat the cake, not the icing.
#7 Social sciences is as ideas game.
I met a bright kid. From BIT Mesra.
And when I met her, i knew she was ambitious. The kinds that wont be happy if they dont get IAS.
She had cleared the Reserve List ( rank 1 ) in her first attempt.
And then a rank of 313 and IRS in her second.
So when she asked me, how she could improve her answer writing, I badly wanted her to get into the IAS.
The truth is that every year I see people appear for the Mains and/or Interview year after year.
And when they dont make it, they think its fate.
Its all luck.
Once you bring that into the game, you lose the interest to work hard to change your fate.
You simply write each attempt, until you exhaust it without doing any new knowledge addition.
And just like you may only have 2-3 ideas in a book you read ( Self Help Book Lover would know ), similarly a course may teach you only 4-5 things.
But those 4-5 things were the only things you needed to know.
What if that was the only incremental change you needed to make, given that you had done everything else.
And by fresh ideas I mean just that 1-2-3 lines that make your answer difference.
Let me give you an example.
So for instance in a question on food processing, instead of writing the usual challenges about food processing, you conclude by
“In absence of food safety laws and poor implementation , food processing may be a bane instead of boon, exposing million of Indians to lifestyle diseases and may add to the cancer burden in society – given that several food colours and preservatives are known carcinogens. Thus if we want to boost food processing, we must begin with food safety laws.”
Chandana was the kind of kid, who like a certain Surana years ago, would chew, diget and internalise any good picece of advice given to her.
She took every piece of advice very seriously.
She secured Rank 50 this year. And added the three letters I.A.S to her name.
And left us a wonderful testimonial .
So a lot of people thinking that I-know-everything-and-don’t-need-a-new-book-new-class-new-course may want to be exposed to the ideas that continous improvement is the key.
Kaizen – the Japanese principal.
Even if you feel there is nothing to improve.
#8 You will have to take your bets.
I was invited to speak at the education conclave in Meerut Mahotsava.
After committing to it, I cancelled.
I also wondered why they would invite me, given that I wasn’t very popular on social media, or even as an education icon.
I mean i only woked with hundreds of every serious IAS aspirants and noone outside that universe knew me.
( The joke is that when we have a session for Interview preparation, we have 300-400 students turn up in the class. But when I take an orientation for college freshers preparing for UPSC, I am lucky to get 5 aspirants )
When I went there, I gathered that since IAS probationers and young SDMs were given the task – they knew me very well and felt I could add some value. So thet probably did not choose a more popular khan sir over me.
I also didn’t want to go because I was reeling from the lack of interview call of 3 people I badly wanted to make it to the list. ( The Mains result had just come )
But I decided to finally go when a friend agreed to accompany me.
What I also gathered was that they had put my larger photo in posters at the center ( with a smaller photo of other IAS officers around my pic ) . And these posters were across the city. [ It should be such a shame to not go )
Concerned that senior IAS officers would be offended because their photos were smaller than mine, I wanted to avoid trouble.
When the talk started, I spoke my mind. So did a couple of other IAS officers. ( The Meerut Commission was senior lady officer from Tamil Nadu, with about 18 years in service )
So when Nishant Jain’s time came to speak, I wondered what would he say , given that everyone had said everything before his turn came ( incluing myself )
And they had been doing well in the Mains ( not sure about optionals ) , so I didn’t know what to say to them, when they asked why they didn’t make it.
Nishant had secured Rank 13 almost 10 years ago and was very popular as he was the topper from Hindi medium. The crowd cheered for him when he rose to spoke.
As he stood, I wondered what was left to be said.
And as he stood, the sun shone nright behind his head, creating a Halo, while I sat 2 chairs away from him.
And he said – “Since everything has already been said by Ayush Ji and other members of the panel, I have only one thing to say.”
“This exam takes time. I prepared for years before my first attempt. I did not qualify.
“I took up a translators job in Parliament to survive.
And then he looked at me instead of the audience while I sat two chairs away from him.
i tried to look at his face, but the sun was too bright behind his head.
“The only reason i am here on this stage today,” he said with the sun still forming a halo around his head. .”… with Commissioner Madam, Ayush Ji and other IAS officers is because when I didn’t get through, I did not quit my preparation. I had decided to keep writing until I got through. Had I quit, i would not have become an IAS.”
And as he spoke, I got my answer.
Sometimes, we do not know why we don’t get through.
Sometimes things don’t just happen.
Sometimes, we may not have answers.
But then, in life you won’t always have all the answers.
And sometimes, you will get the answers when the time comes.
Your job in such a situation is to just move ahead. Do the best you can.
For you grow in proportion to the load you voluntarily take.
If you look into the abyss long enough, you will see the light after the darkness is gone.
There are two tragedies in this preparation.
One is, when your sibling / cousin has made it, and you haven’t.
And the second is, when you see someone who has worked harder than you, is smarted than you, and writes better answers than you – and when he / she does not make it, you almost feel that if he cannot make it, where is my chance?
You have your own fate. And it isn’t the same as anyone’s elses.
And for those of you still concerned about what happened to the six failures sitting in the room.
The subsequent year every single one of them cleared the exam – a statistical impossibilty.
You already lose the chances you don’t take.
Its okay to sometime retreat so that we can look at the larger picture.
But whats not okay is to leave a job half done.
Until next time,
❤️
Neyawn
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