The Great Festival Returns Once Again

No sooner does Holi pass than another festival arrives. Not for everyone, of course, but for a chosen few. And this is no ordinary ritualistic festival performed merely out of tradition; it is a celebration embraced with heart and soul. A festival marking the fulfillment of not just years but generations of prayers and vows. A festival where supplications, wishes, and dreams finally come true.

This festival is the announcement of the Civil Services selection list. Out of millions of aspirants emerges a dreamy list containing just 958 names. The moment the list is released, a wave of excitement sweeps across the country. The media goes into a frenzy. Television channels, newspapers, news portals, and social media platforms are flooded as if struck by an annual tsunami.

If such is the atmosphere in the media, one can only imagine the emotional earthquakes and tidal waves of joy in those homes where the name of a fortunate soul appears shining on that extraordinary, magical, almost divine list. Media teams from across the country rush to the doorsteps of these households. The grand festival of success begins. Interviews, photographs, and videos appear everywhere. The secrets, formulas, and mantras of success are suddenly discovered and widely proclaimed.

News reports enthusiastically narrate how these ‘worthy sons’ and ‘worthy daughters’ have brought glory not only to their parents but also to their families, neighborhoods, towns, districts, and entire states. Stories abound about how the dreams of generations have been fulfilled and how lives have found their ultimate meaning.

This grand celebration will continue for some time. Coaching institutes will soon begin proclaiming through towering hoardings, newspaper advertisements, and posters plastered on walls that these successful candidates had prepared at their institutions. The same photograph will appear simultaneously on the promotional banners of multiple coaching centers. Podcasts and social media reels will soon begin glorifying their achievements. Each of these triumphant candidates will declare that they have always been filled with an overwhelming desire to serve society, the nation, and its people, and that their entire preparation was driven solely by this spirit of public service.

According to these narratives, they had dreamt of serving the people since childhood. Real public service, they insist, exists only within the civil services. Once this divine realization dawned upon them, they willingly placed aside the prestigious degrees they had obtained after intense academic effort from institutions like MBBS programs, IIMs, and IITs. After all, medicine, engineering, and management are merely professions — where is the flavor of true service in them? Those degrees, it appears, were simply acquired as a pastime. The true crown of brilliance has only now been placed upon their heads.

Observe the intensity of their commitment to service. In the dreamlike list of the top ten, several candidates were already civil servants. But that was not satisfying enough. The steps of service still lay below them, and they wished to climb higher. So they continued their penance even while serving in government jobs until they finally attained the ultimate blessing.

Imagine the countless sleepless nights sacrificed in memorizing essential facts such as how many horses Ibrahim Lodi took to the Battle of Panipat. Is it a trivial task to internalize the number of districts, subdivisions, villages, hamlets, and settlements in the country? Is it easy to remember the deeper meanings of specific lines from the works of Surdas, Raskhan, or Tulsidas? Essay writing may have been part of childhood education, but the essay in the civil services examination is certainly no child’s play.

But if one wishes to run the country’s civil services, all these things must be remembered. There are countless such pieces of knowledge. One does not become a celebrated son or daughter of the nation without effort. One must swallow volumes of books whole before even earning a needle-tip chance of appearing on that magical list.

We are a nation of nearly 1.5 billion people, yet the magical list each year contains fewer than a thousand names. It is an enormously responsible role, and with it comes an equally grand reward. That reward is what distinguishes the worthy from the unworthy. It is this reward that pulls even brilliant graduates of IITs away from the dazzling world of artificial intelligence and quantum physics into the corridors of the secretariat. Even graduates of IIMs may spend their entire careers chasing corporate leadership, but the magical wand they seek can never match the authority embedded within the nest of the civil services. Proverbs are not coined without reason — it is often said that the wealth earned by one generation can sustain seven generations.

This grand festival repeats itself every year. Each year new faces from the latest list announce fresh dreams of serving the nation and its people. The public reads and listens to their stories, proudly showing them to their children. Yet as the list slowly fades from public memory, the conversations surrounding it also begin to fade.

The ordinary citizen still appears to stand exactly where he stood before. Files and the administrative system continue to move at their own pace. Those who once stood among the people become rulers, and rulers, after all, remain rulers.

A ruler must know how to rule; what other skill does he truly need? Yet occasionally someone imagines change. In the hope of recognizing genuine expertise, experiments like lateral entry are introduced. Perhaps, it is hoped, fresh winds from the outside world will bring new methods and shake the stagnant layers of bureaucracy. But gradually even that breeze dissolves into the dust of the same corridors. The system is so vast and so old that any new water entering it eventually takes on the same color. Whether someone studied anthropology, Sanskrit, medicine, or law, they all ultimately become players within the same labyrinth of files.

In a few days, this grand celebration too will slowly fade away. The media will begin searching for its next sensational subject. Coaching institute posters will fade under sun and rain. And preparations for the next harvest will begin.

Across the country, millions of rooms will once again close their doors — cramped paying-guest accommodations, hostel desks, and village verandas where the next round of penance begins for those dreaming of appearing on the next magical list.

The pages of thick books will again wear out. Notes will again be memorized. The same bundle of dreams will once again be placed upon countless shoulders. The only difference is that among the millions of seekers, only a few hundred will attain salvation through the civil services.

Yet those who do not attain this salvation are not failures. They may not be the celebrated sons of the nation, but they are certainly not worthless either. Not everyone can become a ruler. For rulers to exist, there must also be citizens. And that too is a form of dignity. Sometimes that thought alone is enough to bring happiness.

(The author is a journalist.)