Around the same time last year, I was wondering exactly the same thing I’m thinking right now –
How did I end up here? Why did I end up here?
Wanting to appear in the UPSC CSE exam was completely my choice so I can’t blame anyone for that.
I remember the day I quit my first job after completing college and decided to prepare full-time for civil services. Ngl, I was scared af but went on with the decision… and that’s when my life took a turn. For good or bad, I don’t know. So far it’s been terrible. I failed my second attempt this year. It’s devastating. I’ve cried my eyes out for a month now. I’m sitting on my bed and getting flashbacks of the last two years. Can’t help but question why the fuck I ever decide to go on this path.
I’m reading these pages of my diary and I realize that I never really got to the ‘WHY’ part of the question. God! I look so confused. I was writing and thinking anything, literally!
So far I’ve blamed my old corporate job, my parents and pretty much whole universe for subtly pushing me towards this path, knowing that it was all me from the very start. Whether I like it or not, it was my decision. My parents did persuade me to go for UPSC but in the end, it was me who yielded to their persuasion.
Why did I decide to quit a nice well-paying corporate job for some service with less than 0.2% acceptance rate?
After graduation, I resumed my work at the same company I interned in. The company worked in the field of AI and Big Data, I love that! I didn’t like the new city and the working hours. God! Working hours!!! I know you gotta work more in startups but 10-12 hours a day…that’s ridiculous! Is that what pushed me to quit the job- corporate slavery? But I could’ve easily joined another IT company, after all there’s no dearth of mediocre IT jobs for Indians. Why didn’t I switch? Maybe, ’cause I got used to it, besides I had amazing colleagues.
Weekends were fun. Weekdays were hectic but still fun. It was all good until the Pandemic hit and the government declared lockdown.
Don’t be fooled, I didn’t hate the lockdown, in fact, I loved it. I enjoy solitude.
If Aristotle was right – I’m a beast. WTH! JK.
It was fun for the first three weeks until I returned to my parents. WFH was still going but all the fun was missing. I had to get up early and take out 1Hr. during lunch and dinner each to help mom or else I was being an ungrateful child (cuz Indian household!!).
All this while working the same number of hours. My mom wanted me to have a healthy lifestyle, she wasn’t wrong but it was my first job and it didn’t matter if the meetings were scheduled late at night, I had to attend them. It was lockdown and WFH, obviously, no one cared about time and availability, ’cause what else was keeping you busy?
This was also the worst phase of my life in terms of mental health with all the useless therapy, suicidal ideation and some NSSI shit! Obviously my family wasn’t making it easy for me. I still think I resigned my job because of my parents and how living with them was affecting my mental health. But these didn’t compel me to enter the race of UPSC aspirants. If anything, these should have worked as deterrent.
In the next couple of months, I became sort of an expert in my job, and then everything started getting monotonous. Talking to clients, presentations, designing solutions, handling the taunts of my parents, etc. etc. Same shit over and over again. It felt like I was trapped inside my laptop screen and outside the world was moving. So much was happening, people struggling and suffering, Covid heroes helping patients.
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//UPDATE//
OMG! OMG!!!! I think I just remember why I did what I did and what triggered the final plan of civil services in my head. I think it was this news feed I read on my phone about some IAS officer who single-handedly kept his district from going into the Oxygen crisis. It’s amazing how we hear so many inspiring stories on a regular basis and forget about them until one day a simple piece of news changes the course of our life.
While rest of the India was struggling to find extra cylinders of oxygen, his district had a surplus of that and they distributed it to nearby hospitals. That officer proactively got the Oxygen factories up and running much before the crisis actually happened.
Alright, I don’t remember how accurately I’m telling this news feeds story but I know I wanted to be that officer at that moment. Maybe that was the starting point. I was working in a big data company, we created Covid-related analytical dashboards, and we studied data of patients and hospitals and everything, we had analyzed a lot of data, tracked ongoing crisis and tried to predict other possible future crises but what were we doing in reality? Everything was on paper , well… in this case, everything was on our screens.
No work is less but never before I had felt so uselessly passionate. My passion for working in a tech firm fell short against the purpose I saw IAS officers working for. I guess this was it, I wanted purpose.
I was sitting behind my screen making model dashboards and business plans to lock in million-dollar deals for my company. Deals that were not even benefitting my own people, my country. A little wave of nationalism or whatever that was and DANG! I’m here.
I may have resigned because of my family or for whatever reason I believe but this was the final trigger. (Atleast that’s what I think right now)
Anyway, now I’m stuck, I don’t know if it was a good decision or if I just dig my own grave.
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O Boi! I need to find the name of that IAS officer and mention it here.