From Miss International India title in 2023 to now a commissioned Army officer: How Pune-based Kashish Methwani did it all 

Kashish secured an All India Rank of 2 in the Combined Defence Services (CDS) examination in 2024, and entered the Officers Training Academy in Chennai.

“Since childhood, she was keen on participating in every competition in school. She used to say, ‘Mujhe sab kuch karna hai (I want to do everything)’. Generally, it is parents who tell children to participate, never mind the result. In our case, she used to tell us that she would compete in cultural and other events and not worry about the outcome,” says Shobha Methwani, Kashish’s mother.

Speaking of ‘ands’, Kashish is a national-level pistol shooter and a basketball player, a tabla player and a Bharatanatyam dancer. Methwani has also founded an NGO, Critical Cause, which raises awareness about plasma donation and organ donation. She has packed all these achievements into 24 years. Kashish was also selected for a PhD at Harvard University but chose the Indian Army instead. She also stepped away from the glamorous world of a beauty queen for a very different world of a soldier. Today, her long tresses are gone and she carries herself as an officer.

“It was an emotional moment to watch her, even though since childhood she has excelled in everything she does, fighting against all odds to achieve her dreams,” Kashish’s sister Shagufta posted on a social media platform after the latter was commissioned.

Kashish is the first woman officer in her family, which does not have a soldier background. Her father, Dr. Gurmukh Das, is a scientist who retired from DGQA (Director General Quality Assurance), Ministry of Defence, as Director. Shobha is a teacher at Army Public School, Ghorpadi. Kashish and Shagufta, an engineer, are alumni of Army Public School, and both girls were academically brilliant.

Though Kashish was always driven and dedicated, her success story was shaped by the rigours of the National Cadet Corps. “Earlier, she used to talk about being a neurosurgeon. After joining the NCC and going to Delhi to participate in the Republic Day parade, she began to think seriously about joining the army,” says Shobha. It was during this R-Day event, on January 26, 2021, that Kashish was awarded the All India Best Cadet Trophy by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In her TEDx talk, she says, “Being a cadet, discipline and time management was ingrained in me.”

As a cadet, she learned to push “myself beyond my limits when my body was giving up”. “In NCC, I learned how to be a better leader. How to motivate not just myself, but those around me, my squad when we were all tired. I learnt to be a better speaker and more importantly a better person,” she says.

Shobha says that the avenues that Kashish explored—and excelled in – were at her own initiative. Beauty pageants, for instance, were not a thing in her family “but, we never stopped her,” says her mother. “We used to wonder about her interest in pageants as there was nobody in our house in this field but she was interested in participating,” says Shobha. Incidentally, it was while preparing for her Miss India pageant that Kashish was also appearing for the CDS exam.

At Officers’ Training Academy also, Kashish brought home medals in a wide range of competitions, from debates to sports. She is a winner of the AAD Medal, the highest order of merit commissioned into the Army Air Defence. She won a gold medal in March and Shoot Competition, the Sikh Li Regiment Medal and scored the highest in the Academy for shooting. She has a Drill and Discipline Badge for best drill in academy and a spotless record of zero punishments throughout, a Basketball Alpha String (Merit Card) and Best Player Intercoy Basketball Competition, among others. “She got into martial arts, which she had never done before,” says Shobha. Kashish was also entrusted with leadership as Battalion Under Officer (BUO) for one term and Academy Under Officer (AUO) for another term, which are the highest ranks.

According to Kashish, the secret to excelling in different fields is to “basically try out different things and find what makes you happy, what is your calling, what are you passionate about?”. “The key is to build your career on those things so that you always go to work happy. When you love what you’re doing, no matter what comes in your way, you will push through and try to excel in that field. But finding your field is just the first step,” she says.

“She has experienced difficulties, but she has great resilience. I cannot say that she inherited this from us; her talent and dedication are natural and inborn. She was like a catapult, springing back after every low. There was an environment of education in our house. We have a TV but we don’t watch it a lot. Kashish was always busy with cultural programmes and academics. She was doing a lot of things and managing her time well,” says Shobha.

Kashish has struggled with self-doubt, acne, body issues, impostor syndrome and repeated failures. “I realized that I am not what I am tricking myself into believing, that we are not the mean voice in our head. We are so much more than that voice. You all are so much more capable of doing so much more and we have all been lying ourselves into believing that we are not,” she says.

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