sangh lok seva ayog

20th may 2007 is a day unlike any other in the life of a civil service aspirant. leave alone the students even the shopkeepers and washer men in north Delhi colonies like mukherjee nagar are aware of it.

i got up at 7 and after a mandatory Maggi breakfast [ after mom's 111 directions to have sugar and curd :( ] i set off for my centre, for yet another tryst with destiny.

the exam has been behaving like something of a runaway bride (only if it were Julia Roberts instead..lol). for two years every may it starts with an "i do" only to beat a hasty retreat by the next. will it be any different this year? i have no idea....but what fun is a journey to a destination you are sure of getting to...tamso ma jyotirgamay...from darkness to light...our journeys :)

the previous night had been weird . i could only sleep for a couple of hours after i spent double that time in trying to sleep. every time i changed the AC's temperature it reminded me of all the places on the planet with a temperature like that. so i kept oscillating between vostok and al aziziya while staying put in the four walls of a Delhi structure.

to distract myself i thought of everything from Macbeth to Milton Friedman to mohenjo daro to mollisols. alas!! the thought clouds kept shielding the golden sunlight of sleep.

when i finally slept i found myself in a childhood dreamland. with memory taps running over warm plains of nostalgia caressed by the mellow sound of silence.

dream scientists believe that regressions like this to a younger , easier world are symptomatic of a sense of concurrent insecurity or denote attempts to get away from a situation which may not be entirely to our liking.

the surreal feeling hung around me as i woke up to the mild hum of the air conditioner and made my way to my aurangzeb lane centre. passing the vicinity of India gate turned into a full scale mnemonic warfare as pieces of history flew around in the head like lost asteroids in a planet building episode.

entering into the classroom dispelled a number of personal myths. one was the belief about my school having the worst benches in the world , it just got a lot worse. i should have brought some tetanus injections alongwith :) another was about it having the worst crowd.

not only the room was all boys :( even the windows and blackboard looked distinctly masculine as if to respond to this new stimuli situation. i reached a score of minus 5 even before seeing the paper, hurtling down a score indifference curves.

the paper itself was a lot of fun. after 30 minutes i had enough answers to clear the cut off. the next 90 minutes were spent shading, reshading , erasing and reshading the bubbles. in between i thanked the man who must have discovered multiple choice exams a zillion times. imagine the time saved. no need to remember someone else's rhetoric and pose it as your own. plain simple business...

after exhausting my leisure faculties i started going out every 10 minutes for no reason. to ensure multiple safe passages i had informed the examiner that i was metabolically challenged on the day. the poor guy kept feeling sorry for all the time i was loosing due to the "breaks".

as i came out of my centre at 11:30 i realized why Delhi is the capital city with maximum number of trees per acre . i reached a friend's car by following the shadow line's of a dozen gulmohars. next, i went to shahjahan road to pick up a friend from his centre at the upsc. some journey, aurangzeb to shahjahan...lol

we reached khan market for a lunch.it was a sunday morning and unlike mukherjee nagar service providers , civil services aspirants didn't constitute much of a market opportunity for khan market traders.we had to get into mc donalds. a lot of pepsin and trypsin were fated to be wasted.

the general studies paper started at 2:30. by 3:00 it was all clear besides a dozen maths sums. creature of nature i started with my walk outside the class and shading re shading routines.

a little later the controller from upsc walked in. he asked the invigilator for his name. shiv kumar.

i tried spotting a third eye. in vain.

he was paid six hundred rupees for the day's work. a hundred and a five hundred note. he counted them thrice , testing his fate, nothing changed.

i wondered what he'll do with the money. maybe his daughter's school fee, or probably wife's medicine or maybe a long promised trip to an amusement may materialize for the family.

and for me?

a couple of large piazzas, or maybe a movie for two. OK 600 won't be enough for these "needs"

would my giving and clearing this exam change anything? would it bridge the gap? or will it only serve to accentuate it?

the escapist gene kicked in and i slipped into the easier world of mathematics rather than take on actual questions that confront my life. Freudian repression ensured that i soon lost memory of the very thought and got the mathematics right.

i reached my favourite campus tea haunt in the evening. immediately 2 people cornered me and carpet bombed me with questions about the paper.

it feels odd to be called sir by a couple of 30 years when you are all of 23. either its good grounded maturity or it may be a delusional out corp on an illusional plain.