I am a born bureaucrat

One minute we are age 22 and the next minute we turn 65. Don´t wait until the opportunity passes you by and it is no longer an option for you to do something that you really should be doing. Don´t hesitate to jump on opportunities that will help you grow. Throw yourself at your dreams and make them happen!

One of the most cutest bureaucrats of Asia

I am thankful to all those who said NO to me. It's because of them I did it myself......
Albert

Improving Essay Writing

I thought I had written a very good essay last year. Yet, when the marks came, I found out I had got only 80 / 200. Essay, together with GS, had pulled my rank down. So I sat down with my father, spoke to a couple of friends, took everybody’s feedback and concluded that there were 3-4 things I needed to work upon. I tried to improve upon them this year, and thankfully it worked and I got 135 / 250 this time. So in this article, I would just try to list those lessons learnt so that others may take some cues.


Lesson #1: An essay should be for a general person and not a subject expertLast year I wrote on the PPP topic which was from my subject area (Economics). So while writing the essay, I put in many higher economics concepts like lemon’s problem, information asymmetry, agent – principle problem. I thought this would give my essay a killer punch. But this didn’t and couldn’t have worked as the persons checking the essay are not economists – they may have other background. So I should have written an essay without the use of any technical concepts and phrases, in simple simple language only. This is what I did this time.


Lesson #2: Points should be covered in sufficient depthWhile practicing last year, I used to write in detail about whatever points I was writing. It used to take around 1900 – 2000 words. I used to send my mock essays to my friends for feedback, and a friend wrongly advised me (and I believed him) that I should cut down the length to around 1200 words. I did that in the exam but the result was that I couldn’t cover any of my points in the needed detail. If you look at my past year’s essay, you would find I began a point, wrote one sentence about it and then immediately concluded it. Now I am not saying that 1200 words essays are not good, but just that one should write as much as the proper coverage of points in the essay demands. It may be 1200 or 2000 or 2500, but coverage should be proper. This year I worked on it and covered my points in somewhat greater detail.


Lesson #3: Wide range of points should be coveredLast year, I later realized, I had covered only a narrow range of points and that too from a limited economist’s perspective. I had neglected the social, political, cultural aspects of the problem and as such my essay was not comprehensive. So this year I worked on it and tried to cover S&T issues from as wide angle as possible and as many relevant points as I could think.


Lesson #4: ‘Continuity’ in Essay: Essay StructureAlmost everybody advises us to have continuity between various parts of the essay and make them coherent. Now this is an art and many people are able to accomplish this. But I am not as gifted with arts, so I tried to create at least an ‘appearance’ of continuity this time. I chose a central theme of my essay (that S&T are very important, without them nothing will happen, but they are not the panacea and we need proper policies and administrative framework to reap maximum benefits) and reinforced this theme from the introduction to throughout the essay. For any point I took, be it agriculture or energy or medicine or industry, I kept on reinforcing this point again and again. This gives an impression and also actually lends some continuity to the essay. Second thing I did was to divide my essay into various sections with headings (in bold) for each section and then in the introduction part itself, I mentioned that the essay is divided into following sections and these are the sections to come. All this lends a basic structure to the essay and this basic structure, together with the central theme, provides that needed ‘continuity’ to the essay – at least in the minds of the examiners.


Miscellaneous
Other things have to be there like a strong opening, use of examples from daily life to drive home a point, good handwriting etc.



Source: Khelo India

The shortcut myth
All you need to do to convince yourself that our society is addicted to shortcuts to success is to watch late night television. In the brief span thirty minute informerical,you will be regaled with the supposed merits of wonderful products that will enable you to increase your memory power within a four months, get dark spots free skin within a week,lose ten kgs of body weight within a month ,or about crash course books to crack MBBS, IIT, etc with a merely hundred days preparation.
We have become junkies of this shortcut mentality. We regularly watch television shows or movies which present compelling national or family crisis that are resolved within a few minutes or hours, and everybody involved lives happily ever after. Naive people assume that everyone else is already on the fast track, so they are gullible with respect to these shortcut gimmicks.
Beverly sills,international opera star,noted author, and great patron of arts once said."there are no shortcuts to any where worth going",this is true today as it has been true throughout recorded history.
The news bulitaints are full of the stories of people who have experienced"overnight success"in their professional or personal lives, if you will really explore these people's experiences, you will find that their success is a product of many years of focused intensity, their seeds of success were fertilised with desperation and watered with the blood, sweat and tears of personal struggle. After all this success often arrives wrapped in a beautiful package that seems to have been delivered overnight, but,in reality the success was an intricate recipe that was long in the preparation stage before it came out of the oven.
As you go through your day today, be sure that each of the goals you seek are Worthy of your talent and efforts,because there is no shortcut from here to there, and also be sure that struggle you face today is the springboard to your destiny