CSE 2020 Results out! Best of Luck for Prelims 2021

There is nothing that you have said above that I disagree to :)

I once asked an investment banking friend, you have almost turned into a corporate slave. He was one of the few people in India who actually got a 7 figure salary including bonuses at an age of 28. What will do you with so much perks and bonuses?

He said something, which was worth giving a thought. He said that’s the only thing you can do. He said if I don’t “ indulge “ in it , I may just have an existential crisis. Some sorta mid life crisis worrying about what the duck am I doing in life. That’s another set of depression.

While you are into something, you have to make a big deal out of it. Else you may not even have the motivation for it. 

You know what is more dangerous than people who don’t think it’s a great job? People who crack the services and think its a crappy job. All the responsibility, political pressure and thankless public. Try meeting one of those.

As far as the “inspiration” part is concerned,  aren’t we all under the colonial hangover?

P.S. Thank you for keeping the debate mature and impersonal :)

@mahi2501 I am an old ( age wise too! 😥 )

member here so you may see people agreeing with me on some issues. That does not mean they are disagreeing with you . Please don’t disappear after taking this the wrong way :(

I won’t forgive myself, then!

The last part, yes that’s so very true. You gotta believe you are doing something great, or you wouldn’t survive doing ANYTHING.

I wouldn’t go as far to say that a public should be thankful or “indebted” to the public servant who serves them, but yes a small recognition is always good. The indebtedness is a very third world phenomena, but the recognition and acknowledgment exists even in the first world.

I will agree to the part that more people see Shubham as a success , than just an IAS officer. And success is rewarded ( not very equally though) in almost all walks of life.

And people here, do you know that@Inselberg from the forum has under 30 rank and will be joining IFS. let us congratulate him and ruin his anonymity which he so ardently asked me to protect this morning 😬😈😈 ( evil smile )

In the video posted, security and reception, here in my state only ministers get dat! he sounds humble thou! 

Plus 100...i pray to God that govt takes action against all kind of coaching mafias(JEE UPSC ) . 

What they teach is not called education.. It's called mediocrity to rote learn

“ No candidate can get through CSE by reading crap materials of coaching mafia”

But many people do clear the exam by reading vision PT365 or Mains 365. Many people do write tests. In fact they spend a lot of time improvising , taking feedback’s and coming up with better answers.

Most of the teachers are very well read, at least in New Delhi and after a point of time they may be bad teachers because they are unable to go down to the level of the students knowledge and start from a certain basic - not because they lack conceptual clarity!

Sometimes you may not get the right answers because probably you are not asking the right questions.

When you make a statement like that, you do not discredit selected candidates or the coaching, you just further the objective of putting people into some sort of skepticism and on a progressive path of nihilism.

That nothing can be done ,the exam can’t be prepared for,  we must sit back and play Russian roulette every year.

The truth is that there are only 761 seats and only 761 people will make it. And like In almost all walks of life, there will be an element of luck in success.

When you said books/notes/ test series are a waste of money by all means , you forget to add that “for people who do not read them.”

The time is obviously saved because they did not read them in the first place.

Being a liberal has its own disadvantage. Earlier I would not have countered such opinion because as some sort of liberal I would think that an extreme opinion like that should exist. But the last decade has shown that radical thoughts must be countered because while liberal views may make space for radical thoughts ,but radical thoughts have no space for other views.

Also, have you tried reading any of those notes ? Have you tried writing 10 or 12 tests and seen if it brings some changes / improvement in you?  That would require you to write about 30 hours of test writing and 500 pages in writing . If you study about 30 hours before a test preparing for it, you have studied 300 hours and that would be very exam oriented, and that you make something out of you.

Or you could rest back, relax and wait for someone to do the hard work, get successful and pounce upon them and find some pleasure in that.

What have I done to cause it 🤭

Also please note that as moderator, I will not tolerate selected candidate bashing on this thread. I let that happen on the discuss forum, and everyone who was selected left because of such bashing. Then you have no good people and are left with a bunch of negative people. I have done this mistaken before because I thought I must tolerate intolerance and vehement criticism ( afterall it is the lifeblood of decmocracy ) 

This forum is for Civils preparation, and celebrates success in the exam. It also, unlike the outside world does not penalise or criticise failure. 

But I would also not let it become a place to penalise or criticise success. That has happened in the past and good people flee because they have less time and more things to do. The negative people take over and run amock and kill the forum. 

I have my inbox full of people who have flunked and I would like to talk to them today as it is October 2, a holiday and dont have the burden of other work. I can either do that or counter annual topper-coaching notes  teacher bashing. But I wont let this thread be inhospitable to people who have been successful. Seven years ago, we have a wonderful girl - her name was Tajasvani selected in the IPS - who had among the top 5 highest marks in Mains - but got IPS because of low interview score.

Looking back, I realise that some people mauled her just because

(a) In a media interview , she said that rural women could look up to her and realise that they can rise like men too, and 

(b) asked for inputs for rank improvement to get into IAS.

Some people who did not have the burden of writing Prelims or Mains, but merely call names sitting from the audience, mauled her because they felt she was a hypocrite and that she should say to the media that she is disturbed because of low interview marks and was a little disappointed with her rank.

She kinda broke down, and literally blamed me for not defending her then or banning such people - because back then I thought that freedom of speech means on a civil services preparation forum, people should be allowed to criticise the successful civil services aspirant on the very thread that is created to congratulate them . Won't let that happen again. 

@abc123 @mahi2501 This very platform is an outcome of a for-profit coaching mafia.

I don’t know why people are so against the coaching institutes. They are also hardworking people, trying to make a (mostly honest and almost all legal) living while benefitting students. 

If u see around u, everyone is trying to make u crave for their product, be it from a biscuit, chips company to apple to Mercedes. A lot many of their customers believe that their products make people’s lives better in some ways and over long run usually these very companies survive. 

Though i haven’t taken any official coaching except test series for Mains but have immensely benefitted by their study materials and many more free initiatives. Coaching institutes help those students as well who don’t have readily available guidance in their family or friend circle. They help students who haven’t had the best of education during their school and colleges to work hard and compete against the privileged. 

Coaching might be expensive for many but you have lots of information available to make an informed opinion. The coming up of a lot many coaching institutes has improved the freely available content for many who are preparing on their own. Be it free daily news analysis, explained topics on youtube, daily free MCQs or free all India mocks. You have coaching institutes making u available the strategies of multiple toppers, and lot many say they haven’t taken any coaching but many others state it has benefitted them. 

Though i feel that coaching institutes claiming toppers might be misleading but if u make impulse buying then u have lot many better marketers out there. 

On celebration part, i think we should celebrate UPSC success as well even though it is a national exam. Because it is story of a person who rose to the top against all odds. We should also note that such elaborate celebrations are almost always for people from very humble backgrounds.You will not see such celebration for a Delhi or Mumbai student topping. 

Though i agree that science definitely enlarges the pie and can have a greater impact on lives of people in long run so should be celebrated. But it is a long term process and no clear defined benchmark of success. For example, it is very difficult for people on mass scale to celebrate at this level the taking of an image of Black hole (though this is also a popular topic). However, as Indians we celebrate whole heartedly even the success of our Indian American scientists/ researchers who make it big eg. Abhijeet Banerjee. 

We also celebrated Neeraj Chopra’s gold, it is not going to make our lives any better, may be some loss as every other state and central government giving him crores is a diversion of diversion of public funds to private individuals. But it is necessary for a very important thing, ‘Hope’. It tells us that we are no less than others. It makes us feel that we are worthy of something, because we associate with that person in some ways. 

I think the hope of a better life and possibilities that the success of Shubham’s town/ village will inspire many more to dream big. 

THe high craze for this exam, also helps attract more talent for UPSC exam, which recruits for the top posts in Indian bureaucracy. I think this is definitely good for our people and nation. 

For all the coaching criticism and the love for traditional ways, ignoring how banning entire industries isn’t a good principle at all, I wonder do we even have a good education sector to take up the burden if coaching institutes were banned? 

During my JEE preparation days, I was initially a perfectionist, I decided that I’ll stay in school and enjoy my school life. Joined a coaching institute with classes in the evening. While the teachers at the institute weren’t the best, the one’s at school were almost insufferable. At best they could explain simple NCERT concepts, which people who are aware about JEE, isn’t enough. They garnered almost no joy, the environment was very rigid and uptight, almost no room for free thought. ‘This is the way we’ve done things, if you don’t follow, no marks’. I ultimately gave up on school by 11th end, scored ~62% and was nowhere in a good place regarding my JEE prep. The teachers at the institute were good, not subject experts but they gave their best. Always up for solving doubts, always wanting to explain things in innovative ways. They tried developing a curiosity about everything in our mind. One of the teachers was so lovely, he even gave us extra sessions at his own house. Certainly money wasn’t his only goal. 

For the next year, I joined a coaching in Kota, the Mecca of JEE. I had an entrance test prior in which I performed horribly. I was put in the last batch, however by some struggle, got permission to sit in one of the top batches till the reshuffling after the 1st test. Now, the original coaching institute had a class of ~30, this was a batch of more than 300 people. The first day I couldn’t find a seat and we had to adjust 5 people on a bench. I absolutely hated the ambience and felt trapped. But then the class started, and it was nothing like I’ve seen before. Through my life, teachers would teach and students would simply copy. Here the teacher came, wrote a question and asked everyone to solve. While I was still trying to work out what the question was, people started shouting answers. This was true for almost all the subjects there. The teaching was limited to explaining the basic concepts and then letting your mind run free. While it was rigorous and very demanding, it was fun. For possibly the 1st time in my life I had fun studying. The teachers used to talk about interesting concepts, made classes fun by their stories  and overall had a great environment in the classes. They recognised you even in a class of 300 when they were taking 2-3 batches per day. 

I’ve first hand seen how the industry is, the scores of cycles on the roads after classes ended. The lone mall I’ve been to in Kota used to have more space for cycle parking than the car parking. There were people from all over India. People from villages where there wasn’t any decent education facility, small towns, remote places. 

However, I have nothing but fond memories. We were a group of 3 best friends, only 1 made it through JEE but out of the other 2, one’s at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the other one cleared NDA and is currently serving. None of the coaching friends I know have bad things to say about them. 

India isn’t a country where you can follow ideals in any field.

I don’t think there was anything wrong with the video of the topper. I don’t think one person believing he can change the entire civil services is rational. I don’t think the coaching industry is harmful. To me, schools after a point offer nothing other than a means of socialisation. 

Even the UPSC coaching industry, it has helped thousands. Rajinder Nagar’s entire economy revolves around this. I feel particularly irked when people so easily jump up at extreme solutions.

While not wanting to be offensive to anyone, I internally hope that such people stay away from public services because they seem so devoid of rationality and practicality. The country doesn’t need supremely idealistic beings as it doesn’t need people devoid of morals. 

There are other fora available for chasing idealism which actually are much more effective than would be a place in the services. Today is 2nd October, the birth date of 2 great men from Indian History. Many people would argue that both of them chased a version of the world that was too idealistic and impractical and both paid for it with their lives. While their positive contributions needn’t be talked about for it’s been done enough, we ignore far too many flaws which would serve as a reminder why idealism is a futile concept.