UPSC- A Hallucinogen

From 300,000 to 100 through breaks at 10,000 and 1200, doesn’t ring any bell in your mind, well it won’t in most of us. But to an IAS aspirant it’s the harsh reality that starts with a beautiful dream and for all except those chosen 100 ends with a thud.

Coming out of the best institutions of the country, winners all their lives, cracking all competitive exams, they all believe cracking UPSC would be a piece of cake. When their batch mates and buddies are earning fat salaries, they are toiling for 14 hours a day. Weekends for them are not outings at PVR’s or malls but dingy test hall of some coaching institute where they go to test their weekly effort.

No AC offices, no AC cars and no holiday breaks for them. They live in rooms with exorbitant rents (no income source for them), electricity cuts & nagging landlords; they travel by blueline buses; they spend their parents’ hard earned money in flourishing coaching institutes. At the prime of their lives their dates are not with members of opposite sex but with aspirants with same optional subject.

Their conversations are not about latest bollywood flick but latest national and international happenings. They don’t spend time juggling between fiction and non-fiction but Indian Polity and Modern History. They won’t be worried about a movie’s outcome on an actor’s career but with outcome of the nuclear deal on India’s future.

They go through hell but never complain; simply because they see a light at the end of tunnel, howsoever dim it may be. Every minute of hard work put in brings them closer to only one goal that drives them. Every stage of UPSC they clear brings them closer to that long cherished goal. There is a very thin line that separates them from becoming what perhaps we all would want to be.

Alas! To most of those 300,000 appearing in the first stage of UPSC, that dream would always remain a dream. Only a fraction (literally) would become IAS, for the rest it would approx 5 years at the prime of life with 14 hours of daily toil in a self chosen life of delayed gratification eventually lost in wilderness.

Winner all through ones life, standing at crossroads with a question mark on one’s abilities with no where to go and no one to understand the dilemma; UPSC can crack many a soul, can demolish many confident individuals, can affect many lives, can ruin many dreams; and so it does.

One feels like being so close yet so far. What would an aspirant with unfilled aspirations say, well the answers may vary, attitudes may vary, inferences may vary but what goes unquestioned is that UPSC Civil Services exam is like a psychedelic substance that leads you to hallucinations and abandons you there, what one does about it, well 300,000 aspirants and 299,900 stories.

Written by: Rohit Mishra
rohit.mishra@evangelists.in