Zainab Sayeed -The Hijabi UPSC topper who scored highest marks in interview

Usually considered to be the most backward community in India is the Muslim community. But this time it has been proved that the assumptions made by the general public about the Muslim community doesn’t have any basis in reality. As we all know that in UPSC exam held in the year 2014 has set various success stories by the Muslim candidates like Guncha Sanobar, the first Muslim woman IPS officer from Bihar. Now it is another Muslim girl who has made the community feel proud by scoring the highest marks in the interview.

This girl is Zainab Sayeed who has been a student of Jamia Millia Islamia. She has done her  post graduate in mass communication from Jamia in the year 2011. She has been successful to make it to the UPSC examination by getting an overall rank of 107. She scored 220 marks out of 275 which has a made a record as the highest score made in the interview. Though she prefers to be in either Indian Administrative Services or in Indian Revenue Services, she has been selected for Indian foreign Services.

Zainab has scored even more than the topper for the year 2014 in the interview, Ira Singhal who has topped the UPSC exam 2014. Ira has secured 167 marks in interview whereas Zainab has been able to secure 220 marks which is 58 marks more than Ira.

Zainab Sayeed is a girl who is a strict follower of her religion as well. She wears Hijab, and would become the first Hijab cladded civil servant. Zainab originally hails from Kolkata and has prepared for UPSC from Jamia’s Center for Coaching and Career Planning.

She has been asked many interesting questions while she was going through her interview,  one of those was regarding her Hijab, to which she humbly answered ” Besides saying one should wear clothes one feels comfortable in, I cited the instance of a Prime Minister who wore a turban which is also a religious symbolism’.

 

 

–Courtesy “Muslim Mirror”