9.
After rejecting an offer to join the Indian Civil Service in 1921, Subhas wrote this letter:"The very principle of serving under an alien bureaucracy is intensely repugnant to me. The path of Arabinda Ghose is to me more noble, more inspiring, more lofty, more unselfish, though more thorny than the path of Ramesh Dutt....I have written to Father and to Mother to permit me to take the vow of poverty and service."
Sri Aurobindo had deliberately failed the riding portion of this same I.C.S. examination some years earlier, in spite of being a most brilliant scholar.
