Former Miss Uttarakhand Taskeen Khan had dreamt of becoming Miss India eventually. But with a change in circumstances, the former beauty queen is now set to become a top bureaucrat of the country. Taskeen cracked the prestigious civil services examination with an all-India rank of 736 when the results were announced recently.
Taskeen is a social media star with a massive following. Between 2016-17, she bagged both the Ms Dehradun and Ms Uttarakhand titles. Her next step was the national stage. But she decided to take a new direction after her father’s retirement and made cracking the UPSC CSE exam her mission. After three unsuccessful attempts, and surviving the “test of patience and hard work”, she finally cracked the top competitive exam.
Taskeen was not an ace student in early school. Maths was not her strongest point till class 8, she revealed in a recent interview. However, she bounced back to score above 90 percent in Class 10 and 12 board exams in science stream. Taskeen was also a basketball champion, a national-level debater, apart from being a professional model and actor. She qualified for admission in NIT after school but was unable to join the prestigious institute due to her parents’ inability to afford the fees.
The BSC graduate revealed details of her UPSC preparation after her success. She said that her UPSC journey was not a typical one. Interestingly, she got the idea of trying for UPSC from an Instagram follower who was an IAS aspirant. She then moved to Mumbai to study for the UPSC exam at the Hajj House. She then bagged Jamia’s free entrance exam coaching and moved to Delhi in 2020. Despite a stressed financial situation at home with father’s meager pension, Taskeen Khan managed to crack the coveted exam and is now on course to land a dream job as a top government official.
