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What you can do is speak extensively to seniors, colleagues and others in the profession. When I say profession, I mean law firm lawyers across practice areas, counsel, academicians and researchers etc.
Extensive talking to people is what will give you clarity, but finally, a crisis is a subjective mental thing and only you can take a decision that alleviates it.
In case of an Indian MBA, your investment-return ratio will only work out if you end up working in Tier 1 cities (Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi etc). In case of foreign MBAs, the same will only work out if you work abroad. That said the effort required for CAT and GMAT is comparatively less if you have good analytical skills. People crack it with 3-6 months of prep, while UPSC takes 1-2 years at minimum. Two NUJS grads this year got into Wharton and IIM-Calcutta - you can check out their profiles.
If you rule out MBA and UPSC, then your best options are:
1. Start up: It can be anything you are good at including law. Litigation is not the only alternative to law firms. You can specialize in creating a start-up incubator where you advise people traverse the legalities of starting a company or raising funds. It can an application/software that streamlines some work/processes at law firms (you have worked for 4 years, you know the redundancies). You need not know how to code to make an application. You just need to hire a person for 2-3 months. Something as simple as an app to generate stamp duty matrixes, for example? That will save law firms hours and earn you lakhs.
2. Academia: Get an LLM (you can get one in India unless you have saved a lot of money). Become a part-time faculty at any law college in your city (you don't need NET or PhD to be part time faculty). Will earn you a decent 60k-100k depending on the institution. Enough to sustain your regular expenses and not eat into your savings. You will end up taking 2 hours of classes per day. Assuming preparation time, you will work for 4 hours in a day, 20 hours in a week. Then use your rest of the day and weekends to do something you absolutely love without having to worry about money. Can be starting a nursery and selling plants or theatre or learning to code or building websites or selective litigation (pro-bono human rights lawyering). You can anyone you want to be once you don't have to worry about the money.
You have at least 40-50 years of active life ahead of you. Don't restrict yourself to one single profession, vocation or identity. Earlier generations did that because life expectancy was 40 back then. You could only do one career in life. Now, almost all of us will end up changing careers at least 3-4 times by the end of the century.
If you have some time, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIyjkkUk80w
It's one hour long but it's worth it.
Depends on what you want to do in your life
I've MBA in mind but for that I'll have to give an year for prep and applying to the colleges. I am also not sure how this degree will help someone who has disputes background!
No plans to settle outside as my parents won't come with me.
Sorry but very depressing situation this has been
Real estate lawyer/ broker?
Go to Canada?
Criminal lawyer
I have around 4.5 years of experience and currently not working. Resigned few months back because of ugly work environment. I want to explore options outside law practice. Please suggest what all I can try? Thinking for upsc as well.