Xiao K participated in a TV quiz show, answered all the questions correctly, won a huge prize of 50 million, and became a real-life version of "Slumdog Millionaire". When he got the money, he made a plan as soon as possible: to find a good training institution and prepare for the civil service exam again.
Xiao A graduated from a top school in China, and got a Google software engineer position after graduation, with an annual salary of 3 million, but he later resigned decisively, devoted himself to the national examination, fought hard for four years, failed repeatedly, and finally won the first place in the country and successfully landed.
Xiao C has been preparing for the Olympics for many years and finally became the only Olympic champion in the country. After winning the championship, he got hundreds of millions of bonuses, but among the many rewards, what excited him the most was a civil servant guaranteed quota given to him by the local government.
50 million prize money, Google engineer, Olympic champion, any option is already the pinnacle of life that people think is unimaginable, but in the end it is not as good as a small civil servant?
Such a magical reality takes place in the mysterious eastern power - India.
01
Thousands of troops walk a tightrope
Millions of people have signed up to compete for tens of thousands of positions, and the competition ratio for popular positions is nearly 1,000 to 1, which is the domestic civil service examination.
How fierce the competition is in the domestic public examination is obvious to all, and it is not too much for thousands of troops to crowd the single-plank bridge.
However, such a battle is still a small comparison with India.
There are millions of applicants for the national examination in India every year, and the final number of admissions is only a few hundred, and the average enrollment ratio alone is as high as thousands.
In 2022, 1.13 million Indian students registered for the exam, but only 933 were admitted, with an average enrollment ratio of 1,211:1.
In contrast, this difficulty should be as difficult as that of Henan college entrance examination candidates who were admitted to Tsinghua University, and thousands of troops walked a tightrope.
The data for 2023 has not yet come out, because the candidates who registered for the Indian national examination in 2023 are still waiting for the results.
In February every year, registration for the Indian National Examination begins.
The first exam in June, the main exam in September, and the final interview will take more than a year to February and March of the second year, and it will take more than a year to complete these three rounds.
The final admission result will not be determined until April or May.
Indian candidates taking the civil service exam Source: The Indian Express
The preliminary examination of the public examination in India is two general education exams, and the main examination has a variety of questions, only you can't think of it, and you can't take it without him.
It took more than 30 hours to complete these 12 exams alone. This time span and examination duration can only be compared with the ancient scientific examination.
In other respects, the Indian civil service national examination is also very similar to the ancient scientific examination.
The civil service in India is a continuation of the British civil service.
In this system, the number of government employees is as high as several million, but the number of people who are actually "staffed" is only a few thousand.
Once you have the establishment, you can immediately become a human being.
Indian Administrative System and Corresponding Examinations
In IAS, India's most popular elite administrative body, as long as you are admitted, the average starting salary is 56,000 rupees per month, which is equivalent to about 4,831 yuan.
A monthly salary of 4,000 may not seem like much, but consider that the background of this salary is in India, where a monthly salary of more than 4,000 yuan is already twice the average salary.
And as we all know, the least important thing for civil servants is salary.
In addition to the basic salary, Indian civil servants also have transportation subsidies, child subsidies, food subsidies and even price subsidies, etc., all kinds of subsidies can add up to twice the basic salary, and it is not a problem to have a monthly salary of more than 10,000 yuan.
As the position level increases, the salary will continue to rise.
However, there is one thing that is different from that of domestic civil servants, that is, most of the domestic civil servants are recruited at the grassroots level, whether it is the national examination or the provincial examination, and how big an official they are in the end, they have to start from the bottom step by step.
The Indian civil service national examination recruits directly the management.
Indian civil servants are divided into 18 levels, once they pass the Indian national examination, they will be arranged to study at the Indian School of Administration, and after two years, they are assigned jobs, basically starting from the assistant secretary or county secretary, that is, the 10th level, which is basically equal to the domestic official level.
Once admitted, it will be a soaring ascension, and the court will be Tian Shelang, and the twilight will be in the Tianzi Hall.
Since then, these civil servants have risen through the ranks, and the only civil servant currently in the 18th grade is Rajiv Gauba, the cabinet secretary of India.
It doesn't matter if you don't work hard enough and can't be promoted, as long as you work for 20 years, there will be a guaranteed level for you to retire.
That is to say, as long as you pass the national examination, you will start from the main course, and you will be guaranteed to retire at the level of the main department, and other civil servants will work hard for a lifetime, which may be the starting point for others.
In addition to good welfare, the most striking feature of the Indian public examination is that it is fair, at least on the surface.
In 1947, the caste system was legally abolished, but not in the hearts of the people.
Dalits (untouchables) are still at the bottom of the social ladder in India
As a country with a fairly strict hierarchy, the entry threshold for the civil service examination in India is quite low.
As long as you are between the ages of 21 and 32 and have an officially recognized university degree in India, you can take the exam.
It is rare that the entry threshold is so fair, and the Indian civil service examination is also somewhat biased towards low-caste candidates.
For ordinary people, there are only 6 chances to take the national exam. Lower-caste candidates, however, have 9 chances to take the national exam. For the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes who are given special attention, there are even unlimited opportunities to apply for the examination.
It only takes a few years of struggle to ensure stable employment and prosperity for decades to come. No one can resist such a temptation.
More and more people are flocking to the civil service, and the Indian civil service examination is becoming more and more papered.
The official registration threshold is 21 years old, and many people start preparing for the exam before the age of 20.
The scope of the exam comparable to the Four Books and Five Classics also makes people have to devote themselves to preparing for the exam for more than a year. One person's preparation for war has become the lifting of a whole family, and such stories are not new in China.
Gamini, the third in the country in the 2021 Indian national examination, completely isolated from the Internet and refused to socialize during the three years she was preparing for the exam, while her parents were also doing their best to help, helping to make briefings, helping to brush mock exams, and even the older generation went to the temple every day to pray for blessings.
Fortunately, she was admitted. But what about the more people who didn't get in?
In 2022, India counted 153,000 suicides, 40% of which were suicides due to failed exams.
Countless small towns have been preparing for the exam for many years, just because, for the lower castes, this most difficult road is already one of the few fairest and even fastest ways to achieve class jump.
In India's high castes, Brahmins account for about 3% of the total population, and Kshatriyas account for only about 5%, but these less than 10% of the population monopolize more than 80% of the high-quality jobs in India.
The same is true for the distribution of wealth.
As the country with the largest number of billionaires in Asia, India's billionaires have grown faster in recent years than any other country.
But India also has a staggering 780 million people living in poverty. Of these 780 million people, very few have the financial resources and conditions to enter the narrow door of the civil service examination.
Source: NBC News
Above the huge chasm that has been divided from birth, the civil service examination is a fair one-plank bridge man-made above.
If you pass, you live, and if you fall, you die.
02
Everyone goes ashore, but no one goes to sea
The story of India is also common in the country.
In recent years, small-town civil servants have become "Brahmins" in the townships.
Every year during the Chinese New Year, there are a few true or false jokes, such as being crushed by small town civil servants during the class reunion of programmers in large factories, and being picked by teachers in third-tier cities when first-line workers are on blind dates.
Regardless of whether it is true or not, it is true that more and more people are taking the public examination.
In 2022, the number of applicants for the national examination will be 2.12 million, and the actual number of hires will only be 31,200, with a ratio of 68:1.
By this year, the number of applicants for the national examination has exceeded 3 million, and the actual number of hires has reached 39,600, and the average enrollment ratio has reached 77:1.
Source: Picture Worm Creative
Under the infinite involution, the difficulty of the public examination is also increasing.
In recent years, the number of recruits for the national examination has been increasing, but the number of positions requiring a large number of students to start has been decreasing, and there are only 56 positions that college students can apply for this year, which is 106 fewer than last year.
The number of people who can get a ticket to the civil service is becoming less and less.
People who thought they could get admission tickets became more and more reluctant to let go.
At the end of last year, there was an article describing a man who was trapped in the graduate school entrance examination for five years.
In the past five years, she first took the postgraduate entrance examination, and then the examination editor, and finally achieved nothing.
There are a lot of people who don't understand, but many more people sympathize, because it's also three or five years for a lot of people.
In recent years, there has been a fever for postgraduate entrance examinations first, and then a fever for public examinations.
Everyone switched from a volume degree to a paper compilation, because everyone finally realized that "the end of the universe is the entrance examination".
No matter which school you go to to to get a master's degree or a doctorate, you still have to go back to your hometown to take the exam in the end.
No matter which first-tier city the monthly salary of a large factory is tens of thousands, in the end, you still have to go back to your hometown to take the test.
The family will persuade them like this, and the wandering people will probably come up with this idea at some point - why don't you go home and take the exam safely?
Indian civil servants are high-risk, high-investment, and high-reward, but the purpose of most people in the country to take the civil service examination is for stability.
Compared with the precariousness and unemployment at the age of 35, more and more people are willing to choose the life of civil servants, which can be seen and touched.
"You can see the head at a glance" - this past shortcoming, now has become the reason why everyone is looking after civil servants.
In the 90s of the last century, there was a wave of resignations of civil servants in China. According to statistics from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, in 1992 alone, 120,000 civil servants left the system to start businesses, and more than 10 million civil servants left their posts without pay.
How big is this wave? Around us is the world, and probably everyone can cite one or two examples of civil servants going to the sea to start a business in the 90s of the last century.
At the end of last year, Jiangsu also launched a series of support policies for career staff to leave their posts and start businesses, but half a year has passed, no one has followed up, and the expected "tide to the sea" has not appeared.
Why? The god of the Internet café may be able to give us the answer.
There are Sanhe gods in the front and Internet cafés in the back, and these people are called contemporary hippies.
At first glance, the gods of Internet cafes - dark Internet cafes, withered grass hair, and unobscure clothes, no one can understand who is chasing these people.
The video content of the Internet café god is also very simple, playing games in the Internet café, ordering from the network manager, eating cheap barreled noodles and drinks, and coming to pack cigarettes when you have enough money, which is the same as the popular "non-mainstream" ten years ago.
The point is that the sentence in the copy, "As long as I'm happy, it's okay if you say I'm crazy".
The pursuit of civil servants and the praise of the gods of Internet cafes essentially come from the same psychology.
Why are civil servants reluctant to go to the sea to do business, is it because they don't want to make money?
He was reluctant to go to the sea to do business because he knew that there would be no more gold to buy.
Instead of floating and sinking in the sea, it is better to "go ashore" as soon as possible. And those who are already "on the shore" and don't even want to get their shoes wet, how can they take off their clothes and go to the sea?
Why do people pursue civil servants, why do they pursue iron rice bowls, and even why do they envy the gods of Internet cafes?
People are willing to pursue stability because nothing is stable except stability. Since there is no point in rolling it, it doesn't hurt to live one more day and be a little happier.
03
epilogue
The mother is weak and the merchant is strong, the father is strong as a waiter, the clan wants to stay in his hometown, and the family is poor and goes to another country.
This is the conclusion left by Shi Nai'an thousands of years ago.
In that era when the emphasis was on agriculture and commerce, and the road was very slow, he thought:
If the family is poor and the mother is weak, then the family has no help, and only by going away to run a business can it be possible to get ahead. If the clan wants his father to be strong, then staying in the local area can make better use of resources and be promoted all the way in the officialdom with the help of his family.
This is indeed the choice of the vast majority of people for a long time in the past.
For a long time, the bustling first-tier cities were crowded with small-town youths chasing their dreams, and the township system was crowded with "Brahmins" in the county towns whose parents were all within the system.
But now, young people have returned to the second and third lines, downgrading consumption, having fun in time, and being willing to lie down.
Everyone chose to go down, and they were happy.
However, there is never anyone who doesn't want to go up.
I choose downward happiness because I know that upward is no longer possible.