by Gladson D'Almeida for Daijiworld News Network - Mangalore

Mangalore, March 3: For long Mangalorean Christians, on several occasions, have been blamed of showing less interest in administrative services. Youngsters of this community have achieved great heights in the field of science and technology, medicine, law, finances etc.  But their presence in the Indian Administrative Services has been negligible. Barring a few persons, none have shown any interest to enter the administrative services such as IAS, IPS, KAS, IFS etc. This is one of the major reasons why the Christian community has not been able to assert itself at various levels or protest against the injustice inflicted on it from time to time.

But Arun Furtado, son of Philomena Furtado and the late Valerian Furtado of Madantyar is an exception to this. He passed the Karnataka Administrative Service (KAS) exam with a 22 rank in the year 1999. Now he has been appointed District Social Welfare Officer and is already on probationary period in Mysore.

Arun's mother Philomena is a retired head mistress of a government school and this has been the factor, which made young Arun develop a keen interest in academics right from his tender age. Apart from his day-to-day schooling, he had no much exposure to the outer world. This may be because Madantyar, a rural area, is yet to be fully exposed to globalization. 

While doing his graduation, Arun learnt quite a deal about administrative services and developed an ardent inclination to attain success in the same. With this goal in mind, he began his preparation and achieved it when appeared for the KAS batch of year 1999. In between, after completing his graduation, he also completed his post graduation in history from Mangalore University securing the II rank at the varsity level.

Soon after attaining his masters, he began teaching history in his alma mater Sacred Heart College of Madantyar from 1997. It was during his busy schedule of being a lecturer that he passed the KAS exam, which was answered by over 80,000 students for 190 administerial posts.

Out of them only three Christians were selected and Arun takes pride in saying that he was the only one Christian from the district to have attained this honour. He is also the only Christian in the Group A category. 

Arun's interests are not only limited to academics. He has represented his school, college and parish at several inter-collegiate and inter-parish quiz competitions.  He is also a very good ball badminton player.

Arun Furtado, has named his house 'Shining Star', but truly he is a 'Shining Star' in the Mangalorean Christian community.  His determination to be what he is now will no doubt inspire several youngsters to take up administrative services in the future.  Speaking to Daijiworld Arun opined that it is high time that the youth from the community take a serious note of administrative services. He called on more and more youngsters to step forward and venture into this still new territory leaving aside the traditional academic patterns of engineering, law and medicine.