UPSC preparation is never a solo-effort. There are so many people who have contributed to your preparation, directly or indirectly, one way or the other. Arguably the one guy who both backed me to the hilt in my (potentially crazy) decision to return to India to prepare for the Services *and* helped me in much of my preparation is @keshyperion
Particularly in the one year when I spent working as a Probationary Officer in a govt bank in a remote village in Tamil Nadu with a population of some 800 people with 8 hours of power cuts everyday and hardly any net access around, my one link to the outside world (apart from my phone) was my bank email. In the bank, only the intranet would work, apart from official email. What @keshyperion used to do (rather, I made him do :P) was to meticulously copy-paste all mrunal articles (the daily email digest contained only a snippet of the full article) by email, apart from other UPSC-related links I used to send him (almost on a daily basis).
Why am I reminiscing this now? I had an epiphany when, over the past few days, during the course of interview preparation, I've been asking him to email/DM me the many links shared on whatsapp in the groups so I can read the articles properly (for the uninitiated, my phone is such a collector's item that apart from whatsapp & fb, using any other app would eat into its memory and cause it to stop working. When today's smart phone-sizes are in terms of GB's and screen-sizes are in terms of 5-7 inches, my vintage item has a grand total of 15 MB for internal memory and a screen size of 2.4 inches, respectively. For whatever reason, I'm obstinately sticking on to it. :D).
And then I realized that I'd never officially ever thanked him. As they say, better late than never, no? But then again, with best friends, thanks are hardly needed, are they? smile emoticon
Particularly in the one year when I spent working as a Probationary Officer in a govt bank in a remote village in Tamil Nadu with a population of some 800 people with 8 hours of power cuts everyday and hardly any net access around, my one link to the outside world (apart from my phone) was my bank email. In the bank, only the intranet would work, apart from official email. What @keshyperion used to do (rather, I made him do :P) was to meticulously copy-paste all mrunal articles (the daily email digest contained only a snippet of the full article) by email, apart from other UPSC-related links I used to send him (almost on a daily basis).
Why am I reminiscing this now? I had an epiphany when, over the past few days, during the course of interview preparation, I've been asking him to email/DM me the many links shared on whatsapp in the groups so I can read the articles properly (for the uninitiated, my phone is such a collector's item that apart from whatsapp & fb, using any other app would eat into its memory and cause it to stop working. When today's smart phone-sizes are in terms of GB's and screen-sizes are in terms of 5-7 inches, my vintage item has a grand total of 15 MB for internal memory and a screen size of 2.4 inches, respectively. For whatever reason, I'm obstinately sticking on to it. :D).
And then I realized that I'd never officially ever thanked him. As they say, better late than never, no? But then again, with best friends, thanks are hardly needed, are they? smile emoticon
