Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Waiting for UPSC Interview!

Here I am in Delhi since 10th March, waiting and anxiously preparing for my UPSC interview. I was terrified since I hadn't prepared anything while I was in Jamshedpur and I expected my interview to be somewhere around late March or 1st week of April.I was shocked to see candidates blabbering and goofing up on simple questions in their Mock-In-Group interviews. I was being told terrifying stories of UPSC panellists who sent back candidates within 10 minutes after they couldn't tell botanical name of five plants despite the fact that they had "Gardening" as their hobby. Botanical Names? Are you kidding? Which Gardener is supposed to know botanical names. I can't even name 10 vegetables in English.

My hobby was "Defence Strategies and Systems Analysis" and I didn't even know how to define it. I was bracing hard for the difficult times that lay ahead.Then came the shock (or should I have taken it as a relief?). ON 16th March, UPSC announced interview dates for candidates that were to be interviewed from 22nd March to 6 th April and my name didn't figure in it. What about people like me? Apparently I was supposed to wait till 23rd March to get the remaining schedule. This took away half the enthu out of me. My mock interview on 18th went well and this took away another 1/4 th.I was giving serious thoughts on how premium recruitment institution of Gov. of India, UPSC, needs to revamp itself before it can boast of selecting Creme De La Creme of India. It took them more than 10 days to prepare interview schedule of 2440 candidates. And this too when only important criteria is Roll Numbers and location of candidates and may be their medium ( English or Hindi) as well. How did they expect a candidate whose interview was scheduled on 22nd to arrange tickets to Delhi within a week. Or may be they had assumed that the candidate would already be in Delhi.And then came the final shock. On 23rd,i.e. today, UPSC announced that my interview is scheduled for 26th of April, more than a month away. Wow! Great! Now I will have to reschedule my leaves and will have to go back because I don't have so many leaves to keep sitting in Delhi. My enthu was is that I have watched 5 movies in last 2 days and other stuff to avoid going paranoid. Couldn't they have announced the interview schedules with the mains result itself. Probably I am hoping for too much.Friends are advising me to discard this mode of thought soon enough so that frustrations with UPSC doesn't show up in my interview itself. And this is exactly why I am dumping all this garbage in Cyberspace. Sorry to waste your time. Really Sorry!