‘The Real Competition Is In Your Head’: IAS Officer Pari Bishnoi’s Honest Advice for UPSC Aspirants
Everyone preparing for the UPSC Civil Services Exam has heard some version of the same scary statistic: lakhs apply, only a tiny fraction make it through. It’s the kind of number that can mess with anyone’s head before they’ve even opened a book. But according to IAS officer Pari Bishnoi, who cracked the exam with an impressive All India Rank 30, the scariest opponent in this entire process isn’t the other candidates at all. It’s the doubt sitting inside your own mind.
Bishnoi recently opened up about this in a video that photographer Ankit Kumar posted on Instagram, and it’s already striking a chord with aspirants online. The setup was simple. Kumar walked up to two women on the street and asked what they did for a living, the kind of casual street interview format that tends to go viral. One of them turned out to be Pari Bishnoi herself, currently serving as the District Collector of Pakyong in Sikkim. The other, Palak, mentioned she practises criminal law before the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court, so you had two seriously accomplished women standing there answering questions about their careers.
When Kumar asked Bishnoi what she’d tell someone prepping for UPSC, she didn’t hesitate. Two words came up almost instantly: belief and confidence. She admitted that even she went through phases during her own preparation where she genuinely questioned whether she had what it took to make it onto that final list. That kind of honesty from someone who’s already cleared the exam tends to land differently than generic motivational advice, because it comes from someone who’s actually been in the trenches.
What made her story relatable is where she started from. Bishnoi said she came from a fairly ordinary school and college background, nothing fancy or elite. And when you’re surrounded by peers who went to big name universities or seem to have everything figured out academically, it’s easy to start feeling like you don’t belong in the race at all. She said that feeling of intimidation was real for her too, at least in the beginning. But over time, her own journey taught her something important: where you started from has very little to do with where you end up in this exam.
The real obstacle, she argued, isn’t the syllabus or the sheer volume of candidates. It’s the psychological weight that builds up when aspirants keep imagining just how massive and unbeatable the competition looks from the outside.
This is really the heart of what Bishnoi wanted to communicate. She pointed out that most aspirants blow the scale of competition way out of proportion in their own heads. Sure, the total number of applicants for UPSC every year is enormous, but according to her, the number of people who are actually putting in serious, consistent, focused effort is a much smaller slice of that pool. In other words, a lot of that intimidating crowd exists more in perception than in reality.
She also touched on how all this pressure can end up becoming its own kind of distraction. Instead of spending energy on actual preparation, people spend it worrying, comparing, and spiraling over numbers that don’t even reflect the real competition they’re up against. For someone who’s showing up every day and studying with genuine sincerity, she believes the exam stops feeling like some impossible mountain and starts looking a lot more like something that can actually be climbed, one step at a time.
Bishnoi framed UPSC as something bigger than just an academic hurdle too. In her view, it’s just as much a test of mental toughness, patience and self belief as it is a test of static knowledge and current affairs. That’s an angle a lot of coaching centres don’t emphasize enough, focused as they usually are on syllabus completion and mock test scores.
Her advice feels especially useful for the aspirants who spend hours scrolling through toppers’ profiles from IITs, top law schools or elite colleges, quietly convincing themselves they don’t measure up. Bishnoi’s message to them is pretty direct: stop letting someone else’s background define what you think is possible for you. Put that energy back into your own books, your own revision schedule and your own preparation instead of someone else’s highlight reel.
There’s also something worth noting in how her story arc unfolded. She went from genuinely wondering if she belonged in the race to eventually landing AIR 30, one of the more coveted ranks in the entire exam. Now, she’s out there actively serving as a District Collector, handling real administrative responsibility on the ground in Sikkim. That trajectory alone adds credibility to what she’s saying, since it isn’t advice from a motivational speaker who’s never faced the exam. It’s coming from someone who lived through the exact anxiety she’s now talking about.
At the end of the day, her point boils down to something fairly simple, even if it’s easy to forget in the middle of exam stress. The first fight most aspirants need to win isn’t against the other candidates filling out the exam hall. It’s against the voice in their own head telling them they’re not good enough or that everyone else has some advantage they don’t. For the thousands of students gearing up for UPSC this year, Bishnoi’s takeaway is worth holding onto: the competition might look massive when you zoom out, but consistency, honest preparation and a bit of self belief can shrink that mountain down to something far more climbable than it seems on paper.
