[Stories and Poetry from the Room of IAS Officers]

‘Take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off… And start all over again’ – Frank Sinatra

Knowledge Is Power

Divya Sesha Iyer (born 16 October 1984) is a medical doctor, Indian bureaucrat, editor, and author who is part of the Indian Administrative Service in Kerala. Divya Iyer was born on 16 October 1984 in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala to father Sesha Iyer, a retired ISRO employee, and Bhagavathy Ammal, an SBT employee. She did her schooling at Holy Angel's Convent Trivandrum and M.B.B.S from the Christian Medical College Vellore.

She has also appeared in a Malayalam film Eliyammachiyude Adhyathe Christmas.

Iyer was a doctor before she began her civil service career and continues to practice medicine. She joined IAS in 2014 and was assistant collector at Kottayam before becoming Sub-Collector of Trivandrum. In 2016, as the nodal officer of Systematic Voter Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) under the Election Commission and assistant collector in Kottayam, Iyer created a voter awareness campaign with the motto "My Vote My Future" to help improve voter turnout. In 2016, she also wrote and sang the song 'Viral thumbil Nammude Bhaavi' to promote awareness of voting rights and to encourage voting, which was released during a press conference by the District Collector. In 2018, Iyer was transferred from her role as Sub-Collector to Deputy Secretary in the Local Self-Government Department. Divya S. Iyer - #BreakTheChain awareness campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic. Iyer currently serves as the Mission Director of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS). In this role, she was named one of the Kerala Insider 50 Most Influential People of 2020, due to her prominent role in the #BreakTheChain awareness campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic.

She shares in her books, In any exam of our life we need to follow:

• Know Yourself: The first step here also is to analyse and evaluate yourself before anything else, so that you arrive at answers to some of the oft asked queries— from generic ones like ‘Will I be able to work and study at the same time?’, ‘Do I have to go to a coaching institution?’, ‘How many hours of study per day do I need to put in?’ to bizarre ones like ‘Can I be married and still prepare for civil services?’, ‘Do I need to break-up, as I am in a relationship now, in order to crack Civil Services?’ The answers to these are highly customised, as I would like to put it. Once you have decided to take the plunge, ask yourself ‘what are my priorities at this moment?’ Write this down in the order of importance, and put it up on the wall in your room. When in doubt, go back to them and reinforce your decision. The next question that needs to be answered is ‘what are my constraints in this journey?’ Place them against each of your priority in the first list. They may be financial, familial, logistical, or in any other form and shape. The third question you need to dwell upon requires a bit more thinking before you make your list; ‘Who/what all are going to help me in overcoming these obstacles?’ Carefully put down the names of people and resources from which you gain your strength from. This also includes an analysis of your own strengths and weaknesses. If you have an eidetic memory like some of my topper-friends have, you would not need to read and re-read the stale notes from coaching centres over and over again. Instead you could expand your horizon by reading additional material in the subject. Nothing read with conviction goes waste in this exam. If you have an enviable attention span, you may not have to extend your study-time beyond a respectable hour of the day. If you have a good pre-test knowledge of your subject or are an expert in a subject, you will not have to seek special coaching in that. Map out your own promises and perils in various facets such as education, special skills, abilities, hobbies, character etc. It will not only prepare you to answer the same question at the Personality Test a few months down the lane, but also help you identify miry areas in your personality to firm up. Once this exercise is done, mentally or loudly, you are ready to roll. Voila! You have already found your answers to those questions. If civil services exam is your numero uno and only priority at this point, go all out to conquer it. If you have other aspirations on cards or trammels in the offing, plan and divide your time accordingly. An employed mother is no less ready to crack the civil services exam than a novice graduate dedicated to the altar of UPSC preparation is. So take your pick, but the only important thing is that you stay faithful to your decision until you cross the bridge. ‘The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.’— Sylvia Plath
• Know Your Foes: By foes, I don’t mean your fellow aspirants, who are your friends and co-passengers in this journey, and lend you a helping hand more often than not. Your greatest enemies stem from your own insecurities. List down the worst things that could happen to you in this journey…unable to clear the prelims, missed the Mains Cut-off by a single point, unexpectedly experienced a verbal-mental-global block at the interview and landed in murky ground, fell ill on the D-day…and the like. This is not to bog you down with a crown of thorns; but to rid yourself of your insecurities. ‘Will I be able to do it?’…ought to be replaced with, ‘I will get back on my feet even if I am knocked down’. For that, you need to know what all might knock you down and where would you fall. Fight your insecurities with all your might. Stay strong on the face of temptations that might lure you into bad company or undesirable vices that might throw you off the tangen