By Shreyanshi Dubey · Architect & Founder, Varenyam Architecture & Design

The Plan: Four Years of Civil Services Preparation

For four years, my life was organised around a single examination. I was preparing for the UPSC civil services, aiming for the Indian Foreign Service, and everyone who knew me knew the plan. Then, one evening, I sat across from my parents with red eyes and no backup plan, and told them I couldn’t continue.

My name is Shreyanshi Dubey. Today I run an architecture and design firm. It took me years — and eventually a full chapter of my book Roots & Skylines — to say out loud what I told my parents that night. This is that story, and what I would tell anyone standing where I stood.

The plan was clean, clear, and ambitious in exactly the way that made sense to everyone around me. The Indian Foreign Service. Representing India, perhaps at the United Nations. Working on policy in rooms where decisions were made.

I wasn’t doing it to please anyone. I genuinely believed in public service — in contributing to something larger than yourself. And I prepared the way that belief demands: five a.m. alarms, thick notebooks, a calendar that mapped every week into careful blocks of study, eighteen-hour days where the world outside my desk simply ceased to exist.

That belief in service never left me. What left was something else.

When Discipline Stops Feeling Like Devotion

The honest reason I left UPSC preparation was not failure, and it was not a sudden revelation. It was a slow loosening. The structure was still there. The hours were still there. But the pull — the deep, quiet pull that makes discipline feel less like discipline and more like devotion — had started to disappear.

I was still working. I was no longer moving. There is a difference, and your body registers it long before your mind is ready to accept it. Every step on that path had begun to feel like walking against a current. Not impossible. Just tiring in a way I couldn’t name.

The Night I Told My Parents

I don’t remember the exact words I used. I remember the feeling of them finally leaving my body — months of held breath coming out at once. I had no plan to offer, no alternative mapped out. Just the simplest version of the truth: I couldn’t continue on the path I was on.

By the time I said it, the decision had already been made somewhere deep inside me. All that was left was finding the courage to admit it. For me, that night was a relief.

What came next was not.

What Relatives Said — and Why It Stayed With Me

We are a conventional North Indian family. Not a rigid one — my parents are more open-minded than most — but conventional in the sense that a life is expected to take certain shapes. A respectable path. Something you can explain to relatives without spending twenty minutes justifying yourself.

The calls came quickly. One relative, voice full of genuine affection: “Beta, you were doing so well. What happened? Architecture? What does that even lead to?” An uncle at a family gathering, leaning in over his chai: it’s a difficult field, you’re starting late, it isn’t stable.

He wasn’t wrong about any of it. That is what makes those words so heavy. Spoken from love, they land as doubt — and they move in with you. They sit at the back of your mind at two in the morning, over a blank sketchbook, asking whether you traded one wrong path for another.

“I Trust You”: What My Father Said Instead of a Plan

My father surprised me. He didn’t give a speech. He didn’t produce a plan. He listened — really listened, the way people do when they aren’t composing their reply but genuinely trying to understand. And when I ran out of words and the room went quiet, he said he trusted me.

That was all. No conditions. No negotiations.

His belief became the bridge between where I was and where I needed to go. I know not everyone gets that bridge, and this story would be dishonest without saying so plainly. But if you are ever the parent in this scene, know this: trust may carry your child further than any plan you could hand them.

What UPSC Preparation Gave Me Anyway

I left the path. I did not leave it with nothing.

Proof of My Own Capacity

When you can sit at a desk for eighteen hours a day, for months, without payment and without any guarantee — driven only by conviction — you develop a very specific relationship with your own capacity. You stop wondering whether you’re capable of hard work. You know you are. It isn’t arrogance. It’s evidence.

Discipline That Transferred to Architecture

So when I stepped into a completely new field, effort was never the fear. I knew I could show up as early as the work required and stay as late as it demanded. What I carried out of those years was a quiet confidence: give me the smallest opening, and I will pour everything into it. That confidence built everything that came after.

How to Tell If You’re Still Moving or Just Still Working

Working means the hours are still happening. Moving means the hours are taking you somewhere. From the outside, the two look identical — same desk, same discipline, same routine. From the inside, they are entirely different lives.

Three checks helped me tell them apart.

First: does the discipline feel like devotion, or like walking against a current? Effort is normal; constant inner resistance is information.

Second: what do you notice when you’re not trying to notice anything? Your attention drifts toward what genuinely pulls you — mine kept drifting to buildings, light, and old walls while my notes waited.

Third: when you imagine stopping, what arrives first — grief, or relief? If it’s relief, the decision has already been made inside you. What remains is the courage to say it out loud.

Leaving UPSC never meant abandoning the dream of serving. The dream and the path are not the same thing. I still serve — through spaces now, instead of policy.

From the Book

This story is told in full in Roots & Skylines, Shreyanshi Dubey’s book on heritage, architecture, and building Varenyam. → [Read about the book]

About the Author

Shreyanshi Dubey is an architect, founder of Varenyam Architecture & Design, and the author of Roots & Skylines. Her work spans heritage restoration, hospitality design, public installations, and national infrastructure across India — from the G20 venues in Rishikesh and the Kalindi Floating Restaurant at Mahakumbh 2025 to the Ram Dhanush landmark in Ayodhya. She is the creator of HeritArch and a recipient of the ACETECH 2025 Award.