Rejected in Love, Selected in UPSC: Real-life 'Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aana' IAS story from Bihar

IAS Aditya Pandey

• Aditya Pandey overcame heartbreak to secure Rank 48 in the UPSC exam
• He now serves as an IAS officer in the Ministry of Home Affairs, Delhi
• His journey highlights perseverance, humility, and focus on his goals

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Movies often show a heartbroken hero who achieves greatness just to prove his lover wrong. The scene is dramatic, the dialogue is powerful, and the victory feels sweet. The 2017 release Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aana became immensely popular among the youth precisely because of this storyline—actor Rajkumar Rao played Satyendra Mishra, who becomes an IAS officer after his marriage breaks down. But what if we told you that such stories are not just Bollywood fiction? What if we told you that a young man from a small village in Patna lived this script, not in reels but in real life? This is the story of Aditya Pandey, a resident of Vishunpur Pakri village in Patna, whose journey from heartbreak to Rank 48 in the UPSC exam feels like it was lifted straight from a film script—except every word of it is true.

Aditya was studying in Kendriya Vidyalaya Kankarbagh, Patna, when Class 10 brought love into his life. And like love often does at that age, it brought distraction too. His grades slipped. But the real devastation came not from marks but from a heart-wrenching breakup with his childhood girlfriend. The kind of pain that makes a boy question everything. Yet instead of allowing this setback to crush him, Aditya made a quiet, fierce promise to himself: one day, he would become an IAS officer. It was a promise made in anguish, with no roadmap and no guarantee. Just a boy and his word.

Life moved on, or at least tried to. Aditya completed his schooling and, like countless Indian children, was steered by his father towards engineering. He earned a degree in Electronics and Communication from Lovely Professional University in Punjab. But engineering never felt like his calling. So he pushed further, clearing the entrance for IIT Roorkee and completing his MBA from there in 2018. After that came a job at ICICI Bank, the kind of corporate career that parents dream of for their children. Stable. Respectable. Financially rewarding. But something gnawed at him. The promise he had made years ago was still waiting. In January 2020, Aditya took the leap that terrified him—he left his banking job and committed himself fully to UPSC preparation, with no safety net and no backup plan.

The UPSC journey, however, does not reward mere passion. It demands everything you have and then asks for more. Aditya failed not once, not twice, but three times. In 2021, with Philosophy as his optional subject, he came very close—missing the cut by just 2.5 marks. Two and a half marks. That is the distance between one right answer and one wrong one. It would have broken a lesser man. But Aditya had already learned something important: failure is not a verdict, it is data. He analysed his mistakes, adjusted his strategy, and kept going. Those three failures did not defeat him; they taught him. And in his fourth attempt, in 2022, Aditya Pandey secured All India Rank 48.

But let us pause here, because there are details in this story that deserve your attention. There was a teacher, you see, who once remarked that he would shave off his moustache if Aditya ever pursued serious studies. It was meant as a joke, perhaps, or maybe as dismissal. Either way, it landed like a judgment. And then there was Aditya's father, who had once been sceptical about his son's academic pursuits, wondering if all this struggle would ever amount to anything. These were not villains; they were ordinary people who had seen too many dreams fail and had grown cautious. But Aditya's success did more than just give him a rank. It silenced every doubt, every whispered question, every raised eyebrow. That teacher kept his moustache, but he also kept his silence. And a father's scepticism transformed into the quiet pride of watching his son become an officer.

Today, Aditya Pandey serves as an IAS officer, Jharkhand cadre. His journey since clearing the exam has been one of steady, quiet service. He trained at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, completed his Bharat Darshan and district training, and served as Block Development Officer of Kanke, Anchal Adhikari in Itki, and Assistant Collector in Ranchi. In January 2025, he became the Sub-Divisional Officer of Bundu subdivision, and since April 2025, he has been working as Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs in Delhi. From a heartbroken schoolboy in Patna to the corridors of North Block—this is what perseverance looks like when it refuses to surrender.

What is remarkable about Aditya is not just his success but his humility about it. He never studied fourteen to sixteen hours a day, he said in an interview. He simply focused on his goal like Arjuna aiming for the eye of the bird—everything else faded away. He found strength in unexpected places: the teachings of Ramcharitmanas, the poetry of Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. Those lines became his anchor: "When a man exerts his strength, the mountains lose their footing. When a man exerts his strength, stone turns into water." He believed that desires like lust, anger, and greed can destroy a person from within, and letting go of these emotions helped him stay calm even in the most difficult moments.

Did the girl who left him ever see his name in the newspapers? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Does it matter anymore? Today, Aditya will tell you something he could not have admitted at twenty-two: it was never really about her. The breakup was the spark, yes. But the fire came from somewhere deeper—from years of living someone else's dreams, from the weight of being the youngest son in a family that had sacrificed so much, from the quiet fury of being told "you cannot" again and again. The revenge was never against a girl who walked away. It was against every voice that said "not possible." Today, when he steps into his office, he does not think about a past love. He thinks about the future he is building for his people, for his district, for his nation.