Motivation and Guidelines: IASbaba Welcomes you on ILP 2018!
Integrated Learning Programme, ILP-2018 Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out. We dared to dream as children. We dared to jump higher and higher up to catch the clouds. We saw the possibility in the impossibilities as well. But with time, something changed. It happens to everyone. Your happiest memories dissipate, and your excitement about accomplishing your dreams suddenly takes a back seat. There is only one way to keep dreaming – DREAM BIG! Dreams are the only luxury an individual can afford that has no taxes on it. Every year you encounter a handful amount of candidates who clear the coveted civil services of our country. And suddenly you feel a certain high by just imagining your face in that crowd. You start preparing yourself to take that leap – from an individual with dreams to an individual who starts working hard towards their dreams. You take extra efforts to walk the road filled with difficulties. You invest all that belongs to you – your sleep, your social life, and your money. But every path needs to be fuelled with the right direction, at the right time. Every second counts. Every single point matters. Every turn that you encounter will decide your future path. Right guidance and focus towards your aim – are the two main ingredients of any success in this world. Guidance forms the foundation towards one’s success in life. And focus helps you keep climbing, even if the hill is too high or too steep. Since IASbaba’s inception, each step that we have taken has been towards bringing transformational guidance to students from each nook and corner of our country. We realized how important correct guidance is for your success in this examination, and also how it is difficult for most of the students to access right and active, either due to financial or some personal issues. IASbaba was born out of this realization. And since its birth, the love and respect from our civil services aspirants’ community is what that inspires us to keep going and breaking records, year after year. Here we are, once again, with our most awaited and biggest plan for CSE 2018; an integrated preparation plan to cater to your path towards acing the Civil Service Examination – 2018. When we launched ILP 2016 and 2017, we had always kept four things in mind. First, most important thing for an UPSC aspirant is 'strategizing and planning'. Most people fail here, even after 3-4 years of preparation. And if you are a fresher or working professional, it becomes all more compounded. Second, 'what to read and how much to read'? Where an aspirant with minimal notes will be able to get maximum score? You can read everything under the sun and clear UPSC or even prepare smartly with 4-5 hrs a day and clear the same. Third, would be regular guidance and revision and last thing would be a place where in he/she can connect with likeminded aspirants and synergise with them. Previous ILP’s were the perfect product designed for the same. And the result speaks for itself. This is not merely a Prelims Test Series where you get a Plan and appear for the Test. Many of you must have joined few Prelims Test Series before and have had the experience to share. Ask few questions to yourself and share it for others here! ILP prepares you for Prelims and Mains both- GS ILP is step wise guidance and learning ILP gives you a separate platform to prepare along with many sincere aspirants and make a cohort group for self study ILP gives you access to reach out to IASbaba ILP keeps you motivated and directed ILP provides loads of quality content and guidance throughout the preparation ILP keeps you on toes with its planning and forces you to be sincere and honest with your effort Why are we asking all this? Because we want you to feel part of ILP with complete dedication and take it as your pride. If you are not emotionally connected with ILP and IASbaba, and put your faith in us, the whole process will become redundant. Having said this, if there is disconnect between you and ILP, there will be disconnect between you and your preparation (growth) level. You all are here because of a common dream ‘to qualify for this examination’. However not everyone has the courage to live their own dream..... These are the four key reasons or say obstacles and if one can overcome them, success is hardly a step away. First, the idea of difficult things taught as something impossible. You grow up with this idea, and as years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear and guilt. One day you accept it as a reality and move on. Even if you overcome this, you are faced by the second obstacle: Inconsistency ‘A thin rope can leave its mark on hard rock with constant rub’ There is always a disconnect between dreaming and achieving the same and most of the successful candidates have achieved their dreams through their consistent effort. Even if you are consistent, you are faced by the third obstacle: Fear of defeat! It is so obvious to suffer far more than others when you are working hard for your dream and it is not working in your favour. Who doesn’t have defeats? Is success a pack of positive achievements only? Ask yourself: are defeats necessary? Well, necessary or not, they happen. When you first begin fighting for your dream, you have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times. So, why is it so important to live your dream if you are only going to suffer more than other people? Because once you have overcome the defeats-and you always will/do- you are filled with a greater sense of euphoria and confidence. In the silence of your hearts, you know the worth of your efforts and will cherish it all of your life. Having empowered this fear, you come across another obstacle: the fear of realizing your dream for which you have been fighting all alone! Having overpowered above three obstacles and then falling prey to this fear is a sin one cannot afford. You start looking around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that you do not deserve to get what you want either. You forget about all the obstacles you overcame, all the suffering you endured, all the things you had to give up in order to get this far. With our experience we can give many examples of aspirants, who, went on to commit series of stupid mistakes at the doorstep of success and never reached their goal when it was only a step away. Friend, you should realize the importance of this journey and believe in yourself. If you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become the agent of all above processes and achieve it easily. We hope you conquer all these obstacles smoothly and never let any of these succumb you. Before we begin, would like to address few important things. The whole journey ahead depends on your mutual cooperation and support. IASbaba will try its best to assist rather work hand in hand to substantiate our promises but we need to have the same commitment and few promises from all of you! If you work as hard as we do, you would surely succeed. We are here to guide you with your preparation but some well-established norms are necessary between us to effectively deliver our promises. We know that it’s golden to have no rules but it’s necessary to have some breaks on the roads we travel… The whole idea behind a new platform and a separate grouping is to be able to cater with the best quality and capability from our side. We could have done the same on iasbaba.com ,but why not? Since iasbaba.com is an open platform, addressing everyone with the same vigor and attention would be impossible. So, we thought something unique and targeted. We created this platform for you so that, you are not deviated, lost and distracted by the online crowd. We spent our resources, be it for this platform or on content and guidance to be provided to specifically assist our aspirants so that we can assist you on individual basis, to not let you be alone in your journey, to share your agony, happiness and joy! Most importantly realize that we are investing our time on you through this program. From our side, we will be cent percent committed to exploit our potential but it will be in vain if the same is not received from you all. Hence we want to discuss few very important things with all of you as a family This platform is uniquely designed to cater few hundreds aspirants from technical point of view. This is the reason; we have given unique ids and password to all of you. The content, guidance and materials will let you know the amount of hard work, IASbaba will be doing to realize your dream but at the same time, if anything hinders our motivation or act as deterrence then you have to take responsibility for that. What Deterrence? Our past experience with trusting the serious players with our motivation, hard-work and faith seemed to have had fizzled out in one way or the other. Not adhering to the schedule, selling out the materials that are prepared for your success just for a small amount of money, and sharing the IDs with someone else (this time it is device and IP protected), affecting the load capacity of the website happened to literally break our heart. What is the point then—to have a specialized one-on-one course for you? Are you asking us to be selfish— No, of course not. But we will give you some insights into the issues that you will face if you do not adhere to the established norms: Suppose we are a family of 100 over here and the platform is envisioned to deliver best results for 100 people in terms of technical and quality perspective. If each one of you, just for the sake of assisting a friend share his/her Id and Password, the load on this platform will become 200 or 300. This will affect the speed as well as our resource management for the same. Who will be the loser? We had a technical way of solving this. But we have detested from the same as it might impact user experience. Secondly, if non- registered users start accessing the platform then he/she will also start posting queries/doubts to which we will reply and since every time we cannot confirm with our database to check- we cannot confirm who is registered or not. This will lessen your chances of interacting and using this opportunity for the betterment of yours. Thirdly in the era of competition pseudo UPSC exam takers (read as competitors) purposefully register and then in the name of free speech create a negative atmosphere (we were able to catch many of them last year based on the others aspirants indication). But this will only take away our energy and time. Be and use it as the likes of Rank 4, Rank 6 and others who made ILP as the sole guardian and relied on it completely not as a black sheep waiting to spread negativity. While interacting with many of them the thing that hit us most was ‘They had already put faith on ILP and the ultimate thing for them was to follow it sincerely’ We have put honest and faithful association with all our registered users by providing you a close and meaningful platform where we will be in touch with you throughout this journey. We hope the seat belts remain fastened even during the journey for your success. Think and Cross examine all the above points and take your call! If you share the same emotions and connections, we welcome you in our Family :) Let us discuss few important things regarding this platform and its effective utilization Look at the top Menu Bar- From LHS Plan & Updates: Daily outcome oriented plan “The plan is the heart and soul of ILP” 3 Months Plan is given. Full Plan will be put on 31st July Look at the Plan carefully and start your preparation Value Add Notes (VAN) All the update on VAN will be posted on this page. The concept of value adds notes evolved with the pure reason to assist aspirants to understand certain core topics. Value Add notes will be provided to fill the gaps in your preparation. Do not expect us to provide all the minute details. The purpose is to give quality feed of notes in the form of Mind Maps and other related materials that will help you in revision and will take care of issues you may miss while your study. For Prelims, frequency of value adds will be on broad coverage of important issues from Prelims point of view. For Mains, we will try to cover all the portions that are not available in books and have more analytical perspective. Forum: Forum was designed with the strategic purpose that people who would want to connect through ILP are serious candidates .They would require a platform where in they can talk, raise their doubts and get them cleared. How to use it? The 4th Tab in the Menu Bar is ‘Forum’. Once you click on it, it will direct to a page saying “Ask Question” Once you click on Ask Question- it will ask for the “Title” of the question. There are certain categories like- Economy, Polity, Geography, History, S&T; and Environment, Query Regarding Test Series, Optional and Miscellaneous. Now, let us suppose, you need to clarify something related to Economics. Write your Subject in the Title– In one sentence and give the category as “Economics”. Now, write your exact doubt in the description section in detail and then post. Before that, check if similar questions are already been posted by other users. All other aspirants can then, read your doubt. This way, if you follow the same procedure, all the doubts related to respective subjects can be clubbed under same threads for different domains. Whenever you have to look for queries related to “only Polity”, you can search Polity and get all the clarifications at one place. It will save your time and will also you can see that whether your doubt has already been answered already or not. (The Title Box acts as Google Search :) ) Daily Confession This is a new feature for ILP 2018. It’s a sort of SELF TRACKER Why not track yourself by jotting daily routine at the end of the day? You can do it in 5 minutes only. Suppose there are 3 Aspirants- A (Working Professional), B (Fresher) and C (Veteran) All the three will have different daily routine and capacity to follow daily schedule. Since all of them trying to be in line with ILP, their effort and strategy to complete the schedule will be a learning experience for others and to them also. A can be more productive on X-Day but less productive on Y-Day. This way A can track or know his/her follow ups. Same for B Same for C Daily confession (honest ones) will put pressure on you looking at others consistent efforts. It will also motivate you to perform better and be consistent and sincere. More than anything, this daily confession will let you know the sincerity and loopholes in your preparation as well as of others over the period of time. Babapedia (Prelims Current Affairs) Babapedia is designed to prepare you for Current Affairs for Prelims 2018. It covers all important issues for Prelims from various newspapers and articles like The Hindu, Indian Express, Business Standard, Times of India and PIB etc. More than number of newspapers it focuses on relevant articles and content is prepared keeping UPSC’s demand in mind. We have given you the access to last year’s Babapedia content too. For 2018, Babapedia will be updated from 31st July to 31st May 2018. All you need to do is finish that alone along with your note making. We have given the access of last years content on Babapedia. You can check the previous updates. It will be a very good assistance for all of you. You should follow it sincerely. An Hour of quality learning on Babapedia should be your motto. Profile You can edit your name and change your password from here. To summarize: Preparation Methodology Integrated preparation: We do not see Prelims or Mains as a separate entity requiring an altogether different identity. In the entire preparation, one thing stays constant—Perspective building. It is not just an attribute, but a continuous process that evolves a person from a layman to a man/woman with an idea to not just understand but analyse, and come up with solutions. This is the golden secret that will set you apart from the rest and only when we do an integrated study/analysis of the important subjects would we be able to build and work upon the personality that is expected out of a solution-seeker to possess. Current Affairs: This is a very important part of the preparation process and leads most of the aspirants on a ‘lost path’. By this we do not want to magnify the issue of its difficult existence in our lives but we want to bring to your attention the importance it deserves. Never ignore it. Keep a tab on our ‘Daily news Analysis’ which is extremely important to fill up the gap in your Mains preparation and our recent initiative on Babapedia that covers current affairs on a daily basis. All you need to do is update the database of your mind with these on a daily basis and come back to both on a weekly and monthly basis for revising the same to retain it. You would not want to mess up something that you are already aware of and lose out on clearing the exam, isn’t it? Value of our Value-add notes: We understand that note-making and information scouting becomes a very difficult exercise especially when one prepares from home. In order to ease the pressure, we have our experts to scout the needed and required information for you and prepare concise notes in order to equip you with the demanded information and employ ways to also remember (memory tools like mind-maps) the knowledge gained. Again, these notes will be an amalgamation of the texts from the most sought after and standard books for your benefit. It is also a request to bring to our notice if you find any misspelt information (if any), so that we can rectify the errors immediately. We do not appreciate mistake-shaming so kindly refrain from that. Art of Discussion: We have made available a facility called ‘Forum’ to help you tide over the factor of sitting away from the population. As per your Optional, you will have the chance to make a peer group and discuss in detail the preparation and doubts. You may also find sincere and senior aspirant and get to share doubts for effective study. You can make a peer group and start your discussions and let other follow it. Share, learn and co-operate :) Do not make us work like Google for you. Email should only contain any personal issue or issues with respect to preparation not concept clarity or asking concept related doubts. If we start doing that the whole process will become ineffective. We are already working to provide you VAN, Babapedia, Tests and many more things that takes great effort and dedication. You will know this soon! This platform is to ensure the connectivity between you and your mentor not a rote learning platform or doubt clarification modus operandi. For that you have Forum to connect with peers, Babapedia, Value Add and Tests. Asking doubts like ‘Babaji please let me understand about global warming and its positive effects’ will be too much to ask for and will only make our effort redundant in time to come. You should realize the worth of self-exploration also. We do not want to ignore your genuine emails so please cooperate accordingly. Remember that motivation cannot be contained in an email and its reply— Come on, look within, it is already there. You just need to keep it ignited. Let us work so hard that no luck factor for your success and no excuse for your failure!! We believe that our thinking, our strategies, our processes, our learning in the failures before success during the exam, our successes in UPSC exam, experiences post success, our karma and our ability to connect to you is through this ILP. Very Important: Every member of ILP 2018 should actively participate on the platform. We are working hard for you and do not expect your silent participation. It is for you only so at least be visible through comments :) Note- Every one will be on board by 30th July. Full Plan and First VAN will be updated on 31st July along with first update on Babapedia. There will also be a write up on 'How to follow the Plan?' Are you ready for this journey? Comment below and take this pledge with every member of ILP 2018 family! Also introduce yourself in the comment section. Let god bless one and all!!