An excellent Article :
Into the Arena: A Letter to India’s New Civil Servants
By OP Singh IPS
“Welcome to the Service .”
It’s a phrase you will hear in the coming weeks, often with warmth, sometimes with envy, and occasionally with a knowing smile that says more than words ever could. For many of you, clearing the Civil Services Examination feels like stepping onto the grand stage. After years of monastic discipline, sacrificed social life, and caffeine-powered midnight study marathons, you’ve arrived.
But allow me to propose an alternative metaphor.
You have not entered a stage; you’ve stepped into an arena.
Here, applause is rare. The lighting is harsh. And the crowd watching you, unlike your parents, mentors, and online followers, isn’t necessarily rooting for you.
Because this isn’t a coronation. It’s initiation.
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The Overnight Celebrity—and the Long Day After
To be young, idealistic, and newly minted as an IAS, IPS, IFS, or IRS officer is to briefly inhabit the Indian imagination as a minor deity. Your social media relatives remember your name. Newspaper supplements beg for your study plan. You’re the headline: “Village Boy Cracks UPSC”; “Daughter of Daily Wager Tops Civil Services.”
And then, the silence of your first office.
A steno yawns as you walk in. Files—fat with bureaucratic inertia—await your signature. A peon points you to your desk, which might wobble. The ink pad is dry. Nobody cares how much you scored in GS Paper II.
This dissonance between the halo of selection and the humdrum of service can be jarring. The party doesn’t last. It’s not supposed to.
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Deep End, Murky Waters
Your entry into the civil services is less like being anointed and more like being thrown into the deep end of a pool—one teeming with overbearing seniors, competing batchmates, cunning subordinates, and an ecosystem whose instincts are survival, not transformation.
Service rivalries aren’t just real, they’re institutional. They lurk in seating arrangements, file markings, WhatsApp groups, and who gets the microphone at a conference. Your contemporaries—once allies in coaching classes—are now players on a different team. And your juniors, trained by years of handling greenhorns, can read your insecurity faster than you can remember Rule 3(1) of the All India Services (Conduct) Rules.
It’s not personal. It’s just how the machine works.
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Rules of Engagement (And of Frustration)
The Civil Services exist within a deeply rule-bound framework. You will sign things you don’t fully agree with. You’ll be responsible for outcomes you didn’t author. Service rules will sometimes protect you. More often, they will bind you like invisible ropes.
Promotion isn’t purely about merit. Performance doesn’t always trump protocol. A single act of boldness may fetch you media praise but an official memo in your service record. Non-conformity is romantic only in movies. In real life, it isolates.
You must learn to operate within these constraints—sometimes bending, rarely breaking. Every idealist must wrestle with the disappointment of discovering that many changes can’t be made quickly. Some cannot be made at all.
This is where most officers either grow up—or give up.
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The Job Within the Job
Here’s the paradox: though the machinery may seem slow, the job itself is relentless. You’ll attend more meetings than you can count. You’ll visit sites where human suffering has no filter. You’ll work late on budget files only to be transferred weeks later. You’ll write draft after draft of a policy note, only to see it die in committee.
Much of your job will feel repetitive. Surprise inspections, grievance redressal, law and order drills before festivals or elections. The grind is real—and so is the fatigue. Your dream job is also a desk job, a field job, and a thankless job rolled into one.
There will be moments you’ll
wonder if your talent is being squandered. And maybe it is. But this is where real learning begins.
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Playing T20, Measured Like a Test
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