KASARGOD: Last month, when the Kerala Public Service Commission (PSC) declared the examination results for the posts of high school assistant (Social Studies), Mansoor Ali K had come ninth across the state. He immediately wrote to the commission to delete his name from the rank list.
For Ali, the examination was a lesson to achieve a greater goal. He cleared 51 out of the 61 PSC examinations he wrote since 2010. The results of the rest of the examinations were yet to come, he said.
Meet Mansoor Ali, the special superintendent of Kasargod Sub-Jail. Just 31 years old. The man who fittingly claims to know ‘the pulse of the PSC.’
He is a well-regarded guide on social media and runs two Facebook pages, ‘PSC Thriller’ and ‘You Too Can Become An LDC’, which have more than one lakh avid followers. The two pages routinely update their followers with everything related to PSC — from notifications and qualifications to question papers and codes to crack them. His grip over the PSC examination is so strong that the commission is accused of lifting questions from his Facebook pages.
“For an LDC examination held in 2017, 70 of the 100 questions that came were available on my Facebook page,” said the soft-spoken jailer.
From jobs that require a basic qualification of class VII to secretariat assistant and jailor and sub-inspector, Ali has cracked all the examinations. Ali, who has a master’s in history, cleared the first PSC test in 2010, soon after completing BEd. He joined the Kerala Police’s India Reserve Battalion, raised to fight insurgency. “But five months into the training in Thrissur, I quit promising myself never to wear khaki,” he said.
But in five years, he is back donning the khaki again. “Maybe god has some other plans for me,” he said. Ali came second in the jailor’s test in 2015. The first rank holder did not take up the job, and Ali joined as the senior-most cadet in his batch. With age on his side, he can rise up to the rank of deputy inspector general in the department.
But his heart lies in teaching. “My dream is to teach history in college. But after I cleared the NET (National Eligibility Test) in 2013, the PSC has not yet called for assistant professor’s post in the subject,” he said. “I am waiting,” said Ali, a native of Edathanattukara, on the border of Palakkad and Malappuram.
Rigorous practice
After his shift ends in the prison, Ali returns to his apartment in Vidyanagar and starts working on question papers and uploads them on his Facebook pages. “You can find more than 7,000 solved question papers on the pages. And I upload questions which have a high probability to be asked in the examinations. I know the pulse of the PSC,” he said. His followers attest to it. “I had almost given up on PSC (when I found you),” Harikrishnan M Pai, a physics graduate from Thrissur, wrote on the Facebook page.
Tough childhood
Ali’s father, Mohammed Kutty, died when he was 10 years old, and mother, Ayesha K, died when he was 17. He was raised by his elder brothers, who are much older than him. Aboobacker K , 52, and Abdulla K, 48, are lower primary school teachers. “Right from the time I developed memory, both were teachers. When I grew up I too wanted to get a job. Given a choice, a teacher,” he said. He started writing PSC examinations at the age of 18 years. “I cleared the constable examination without much preparation. That’s when I realised I can crack any PSC examination with a little effort. And then it became a craze,” he said.
Score card of Mansoor Ali K