Impartiality of the UPSC

The ‘efficient’ folks at UPSC take as much as a month to reveal the detailed marks of the written exams after declaring if one has qualified for the interview or not.( The whole exam process takes as much as 16 months!. There are comparable exams like CAT which is also taken by an equal number of students but the final results of the latter are out in under 5 months!!)

It is during this one month’s period that one’s thoughts go wild that stem from the disbelief of having not cleared the mains.

Not getting an interview call makes one immediately question the fairness and impartiality of UPSC and also the alignment of certain stars in the celestial space that might potentially have had a say in the disastrous outcome.

Did my papers reach a certain drunken professor?

Was my paper corrected immediately after s/he quarreled with her/his spouse?

Were my liberal views on the ‘dance bars’ question in the GS paper seen as lack of Indianess by the orthodox elderly professor who disapproves of all kinds of dances?

Were my mildly leftist views in the GS papers not taken too kindly by the capitalist gentleman/lady who evaluated it?

DS called to discuss and analyze his mains results and to reaffirm our faith in the impartiality and fairness of UPSC. He sounded upbeat and optimistic. Gone were the uncertain what ifs of the past month.

He had scored an astonishing 170/ 300 (56.67%) in paper I of Geography (Optional I) and a respectable 140/300 (46.67%) in paper I of Psychology (Optional II).

Why the superlative adjectives against the scores that borders around the halfway percentage mark? Those not in the know might wonder.

Here is why:

The UPSC Mains written exams for civil services is set for a total of 2000 marks divided as follows:

300 each for the Paper I and paper II of optional I adding up to 600 for optional I

300 each for the Paper I and paper II of optional II adding up to 600 for optional II

300 each for the Paper I and paper II of the mandatory General Studies paper adding up to 600 for GS

200 for Essay Writing in English.

A score in the neighborhood of 1050 takes things to the next level and gets one an Interview call. Clearly the key to an interview call is scoring a little over 52.5% in all of these papers individually.

And if one scores a whopping 55 %, one is talking about a higher rank and a service of one’s choice.

What is comforting in the situation is the knowledge that a score in optional I added up to 270/600 as 170/300 + 100/300 and not as 133/300 + 137/300. The former indicates that one is capable of breaching the 55% barrier and that with effort the 100 of paper II can be brought to the neighborhood of 150.

The later case is worrisome because, one is unsure of one’s writing skills and keeps wondering if one’s best written answers are at all capable of giving decent scores.

With his faith restored, DS has vowed to redouble his efforts.

Of financial irritants

It’s been a period of financial woes and irritants, not unlike an astrologer’s prediction of a turbulent financial phase coming true.

SixtyOne days after quitting the company, sixteen reminder mails later, (Curiously, mails are replied to only when they are ‘cc’ed to all the higher ups in all the relevant departments thus exhibiting one’s intention to escalate the issue. Unfailingly in each of the replies‘inconvenience caused is deeply regretted’ appears at the bottom. Only that nothing is actually done to mitigate the inconvenience.) I finally receive the full and final settlement.

The courier guy knocks on the door with an envelope bearing that familiar company logo, 8 hours after I lay restlessly in my bed till 2 am drafting a nasty letter in my mind which would question the company’s professional ethics, accountability and lack of concern for a former employee and hinting if I had erred by not suggesting in any of those mails that I was prepared to offer kickbacks for sending across my cheque without further delay.

I jumped for joy and felt ashamed for the nasty thoughts I had harboured 8 hours earlier while signing to confirm the receipt of the envelope.

Alas the joy was short lived and those nasty thoughts returned.

In the Final settlement, my January’s salary continued to be withheld!
More horror was revealed on careful inspection of the document: an obscene amount of money has been paid to Chidambaram and Co as TDS.

I had worked for barely three and a half months to make ends meet for the next 12 months of unemployment. But folks at the accounting dept in Bombay had conveniently ignored my written statement, which said that I hadn’t worked in the last two years and that I did not intend to work for another 10 months, which should have made it clear to them that my income would fall short of the tax threshold. Instead, they generously deducted a huge sum of amount as tax, extrapolating my salary over a 12 month period!. (A prior knowledge of their queer tax computation would have made me submit the LIC premiums paid by dad to claim tax relief)

Was any of the sixteen mails I exchanged with them not polite enough for them to withhold my January’s salary and to deduct the huge amount as tax??!!

Mutual funds investments cause excessive anxiety and loss of peace of mind.

But who can resist the lure of the stock markets when they have taken a plunge from their astronomical heights of early Jan, besides I have always been feeling awkward about the fact that despite my management degree and all, I hadn’t explored the stock market. What with tall tales of semi literate housewives of Bangalore magically converting 5000 into 500000, I have lately begun to question if I was MBA enough?

Having ridden the highs with the markets right from 2005 and having made a windfall, a friend not working in the IT industry, had recently confided that has been of late contemplating buying flats in Bombay and Bangalore!!

By the time I make enough and think about serious heavy investments, the stocks markets would have recovered and the indices would be back to their dizzying heights. So the time to act was now, when indices had taken a 25 % hit from their all time highs.

So off I head to DSP Merrill Lynch and hand over a cheque to join the party. The account statement was promised in a week’s to ten days’ time. Fifteen days later I call up their call centre to be put through an infinite loop repeatedly.
“Your call is important to us, unfortunately all our officers are busy attending to calls. Please stay on the line. Your call will be attended to shortly”.
Six minutes later the voice urges me to put down the phone and call again later.
This drill is repeated twice more and I give up in frustration.

Next I try the mail route. I sent an elaborate mail with the application no, the cheque no /date and such other details. They revert asking for my PAN. I Comply. They revert asking for my name. I furnish the same; that was the last I heard from them.

I am still nervously waiting for the Account Statement.

Over and above the 0.3% Citibank charges for clearing an outstation cheque, I notice that an extra amount has been deducted from my account as charges for the ‘Drawee Bank’

The phone-banker lady is unable to offer a convincing explanation. I e-mail the customer relation ship manager who replies saying that 0.3 % percentage charge is a standard service charge deduction for cheque clearance conveniently sidestepping the real issue. I persist, explaining that it was not the standard 0.3 % cheque clearance charge that was bothering me, but the amount that has been paid to the ‘drawee bank’ that was deducted from my account without my authorization.

It’s really not an astronomical figure, really. My concern is an amount getting deducted from my account that is not part of a declared service charge without my authorization.

Later in the afternoon I receive the quarterly statement of transactions from ICICI bank, only to realize they had deducted an extra thousand rupees above the cheque value that I had issued way back in January!!

Hail Murphy. If something can go wrong, it will.

He thinks it was just average !

He quoted Nirad C Chaudhary. "The average Indian male has sex on his mind and fear in his heart". And explained further, “Though we have sex on our minds, because of the fear in our hearts, imbibed from our value systems, there hasn’t been much violence against women. But lately, because of globalisation and other factors, the fear in the heart has been decreasing. Also, the sex on the mind is increasing, thanks to the soft porn in the media. This explains the increasing violence against women.”

And this was in response to a lady member of the UPSC interview board who asked HK why violence against women was increasing and what could be done about it.

I wonder if anyone can better that answer.
Apart from the original thinking, presence of mind and maturity, it displays among other things a great sense of humor.

Despite brilliant answers like these HK doubts if his interview went well, primarily because he wasn’t asked ‘expected’ questions on one’s bio-data and ‘home-state’ on which UPSC has a reputation of asking a barrage of questions, for which one goes with more than adequate preparations.

Me thinks HK's doubts are entirely misplaced.