Two Years in the Indian Police Service
Experiences in this stream of consciousness are subject to lapses of memory
24.08.2021, 4:29pm — You try to watch TV anxiously as telegram channels explode. “UPSC 2020 results expected today!”, they say. Your parents come home early from work. They can’t sit still — Dad is pacing up and down while Mom gets some coffee made. Your grandfather says “Don’t worry, either way — we’ll get you married this year”. You smile, but you’re distracted. The seconds feel like hours.
24.08.2021, 8:34pm — Your house is full. To the brim. It hasn’t been this full in years. Your phone is flooded with calls and messages, from old friends and new. When you inevitably miss some calls, a friend says “Aah now that you’ve cleared UPSC, you’ve become too big for us!”. You start to wonder — “Have I?”.
25.08.2021, 8:20am — Your groggy eyes open, and you smile as you realise you don’t need to read the newspaper today. But then you realise — holy shit, YOU are IN the newspaper. Atleast, some of them. You really hope that they choose good pictures of you or have the decency to ask. And you go back to sleep- tension free- for the first time in months.
23.09.2021, 3:56pm — You’re back at your University to be felicitated. As you walk by the grey walls where you spent 5 years of your life, you have a flashback to your very first moot court competition in 2013. You’d worked hard and made a good written memorandum, but you were nervous and panicky and couldn’t string a sentence together when you had to speak before the court. Today, your palms still sweat when you have to make a speech.
29.12.2021, 9:45am – You arrive in a small village in Shravasti district in Eastern Uttar Pradesh during your Foundation Course. It’s foggy and poorly lit and unbelievably small. There’s no employment, no development. Walking around the village makes you feel like you need to do something, anything. You spend a week talking to the villagers, asking them about their hopes and dreams. What can the government do, and what SHOULD it do? Life just got a little less straightforward.
26.02.2022, 5:44pm — Your best friend gets married, but you can’t make it. The Foundation Course at LBSNAA is a no-leave course. Everyone is at the wedding, while you are on a Himlayan Trek. You’re just relieved that you get network that day, and you get to virtually see her as a bride.
05.06.2022, 8:40am – You are back at the center for Prelims 2022. You’ve always hated the unpredictability of this paper, and this time you’re armed with only 2 months of focused preparation. You take a deep breath and enter the hall. But you’re unreasonably nervous. Wouldn’t it be worse now, if you fail? Wouldn’t this failure cast a doubt over your perceived achievement and self confidence? In a frenzy, you realise you’ve darkened the wrong bubble right when you’re filling in your roll number. You spend the next two hours, and the next six weeks in a perpetual state of low key panic that you might be disqualified from the exam as a whole.
6.12.2022, 5:17pm – You’re taking your well deserved break after Mains 2022. The exam had gone reasonably well, and you’re expecting to clear. You’re so confident that you don’t even ask your husband to come home to check the result with you. But somehow, you don’t clear. For the first 5 minutes, you’re actually in shock and you cannot speak. Then the tears start. You really didn’t think it would come to this.
30.04.2023, 9:36pm — You’re at a cafe in Hyderabad, relaxing with a friend. It’s a fun, ordinary Friday night, but you have one eye on the clock. Despite being comfortably into adulthood, you now have a 10:30pm curfew at the National Police Academy. You’re well within time to get back, but there’s a sudden downpour of rain. Every Uber refuses to go all the way to Shivramapalli. Your friend decides to drop you back. The ETA oscillates between 10:25pm and 10:35pm. You know that if you miss it, you’ll get extra drill next weekend.
17.08.2023, 3:34pm — You’ve to do a 40km route march with a 15kgs bag and rifle. That’s the distance from your house to Churchgate and back. Cool. But just like everything else at the National Police Academy, your trainers guarantee you’ll be able to do it. After 20kms, your feet have entered a rhytm, almost a trance. But your brain feels disturbingly unengaged — after all, how hard is walking anyway? So your platoon decides to sing bollywood songs. And somehow, that makes you smile, however tired you are. This is what bonhomie feels like.
09.09.2023, 9:34am – You like exercising, but you hate running. It’s just too monotonous – where is everyone running to, anyway? But running is an integral part of police training. There’s all this science on heart rate moderation, stride length, cadence and a whole module on chi running. Apparently, we’ve been walking and running wrong, because of bad posture. So you try to fix it all, and manage to fix a little of it. But after recovering from your injury you’re back to running in your strange style. Still, you manage to do well on running events, even finishing 2nd amongst females in the competitive 16km examination that your whole batch takes. As your platoon cheers you on, you can’t help but smile. You can be good at things you don’t like too.
16.01.2024, 6:23am — You’re on early morning law and order duty at the Gangasagar mela. An incessant announcement system for missing persons drones on and on. A woman is incessantly asking for her husband, calling him ‘Pintu ke papa’ – because of course, it’s not acceptable for a woman to take her husband’s name in public. People come from the heartlands of India throng to this pious mela without a mobile phone, without any arrangements for stay and without a fixed plan. Technology has progressed, with seamless and endless connectivity. But here, the humble microphone is enough.
You’re in a middle of a crowd and there’s a large number of men trying to cut to the front to see the VIP. Your boss is holding back the crowd along with all the male officers. Somehow you forget that you’re a woman and you restrict the crowd too. Men fall back much more easily after seeing a woman in khakhi. You smile internally. You also have some advantages when you don the uniform.
