Life Is In The Moments Of 'Now' - Manisha Chororia - Best50 - Class of 2017

About me:

You desire it would begin, you wish that might quickly end

But God says "Dear your wishes are incomplete.. so lets together append"

Born and brought up in Kolkata, painting, singing, and dancing came as natural to me just as my sweet-tooth. Having taken the classic Science (rebel Marwari) followed by the Engineering route, I landed up in the Electrical Department of IIEST Shibpur with a fantastic group of 'Lyadh' people surrounded by century-old machines. At Least 2500 train journeys later, and with a second rank in the department, I chose to join IIM Kozhikode over EXL Services as a fresher. Greeted by the ‘doting’ seniors, the splendid 'Vatavaran' of the campus, and of course by the endless assignments and quizzes, I decided to en-route into 'business world" and joined the Industry Interaction Cell and mPower (the Marketing Interest Group) at K. But Destiny had its own plans. I was to spend 6 months (YES!!) of 2016 in Europe. I interned at Unilever London with the Dove master brand team, followed by an amazing exchange semester at EM Strasbourg Business School, France. The friends I made, the countries I visited and the beauty I nurtured (food too..) made me a different person altogether. Besides the fun, mischiefs (being caught consistently dozing off in class) and travel, I did manage to study and secure the 9th rank in my college. After this truly incomparable experience, both on personal and professional fronts, I can firmly say that-

Be the kid of your beautiful world, and the father of your dream

As life happens in the moments of ‘now’, just learn to boat in that stream

So to sum it up, just Live your life to the fullest as there is only one life and it is in the moments of 'now'.   If you had a magic wand, what is the one problem in India that you would magically wish away? Explain why. I still remember the beautiful memories of playing with Roopa, the daughter of my house help whom we fondly called Mousi. She had never been to school but was very witty and smart. It was then why I first discussed with my mother why she was not going to school and how she would be an amazing student if she would have got an opportunity. My mother explained it to me how poverty and need of help had led Mousi to not send Roopa and her 3 sisters to school. I resolved that day to contribute towards promoting education whenever I got an opportunity to do so. My first step was to teach alphabets, small sentences, and basic mathematics to Roopa. So, if I ever have the magic wand, I would wish that every child in India gets basic education and illiteracy magically vanishes away from our country. Despite the fact that for most cases, the root cause of illiteracy is Poverty as food is the first necessity for life. But still, I would wish for illiteracy to vanish away because if there are too many illiterate rich people in the country, we definitely would be aiming for extreme capitalism and would inevitably lead to either power struggle or massive war. This is because if people have money but no knowledge, they would lack sense and sensibility to use the money for the right purposes. While if one is literate, he or she will be capable of working hard and thereby earn a living proportion to his or her hard work. I want to give equal opportunity to everyone but not give them money to become lax. Hence, I dream of India where everyone is knowledgeable and together we can regain back our lost supremacy in wisdom and knowledge across the world. By contributing to the technological advancement and sensible politics, I dream of how every Indian will be ready to contribute and make India a better place to live in.   India does not have 1 hospital bed per 1000 persons. It is much below WHO's average of 5. If you were the prime minister of the country, how would you solve this problem? India is one of the pioneers in healthcare and pharmaceutical industries in the world. Despite this, we are below WHO standards signify that there are strong barriers which we need to overcome. If I was the Prime Minister of the country, I would deploy my available resources to get to the root of the issue and then develop solutions to the problem both in long term and short term. a committee which would involve statisticians, economists, finance ministers, popular hospital chain owners, doctors and consultants. Firstly, I will request my statistics department to get detailed data on the total number of hospitals in India, private vs. government hospitals, number of patients (monthly and annually), geographic distribution of hospitals, their locations, amenities available, number of beds, type of cases, number of accidents, specialities, number of doctors, nurses, staffs etc. Once I have all the required statistics I would take advice from the several experts in the industry to find out the root cause of the problem. After I get up a detailed report, I will prioritise the issues to develop a short term and long term strategy. Taking into considerations of the finance and feasibility of the solutions, I will structure the plan into smaller milestones where regular reviews and feedback will lead to complete eradication of the problem. From my current understanding, my major focus in the short term would be to incorporate the facilities of the private hospitals and mandate them to provide a certain free service to the public. They have a lot of additional amenities, beds and free space to provide basic health care to the people of India. In the long term, infrastructure facilities have to be developed to set up more hospitals. Then I have ben ensure there is an availability of doctors, nurses, staff members, technology etc. Also, I will start a training program in every high school so that children are transferred knowledge of basic first aid, road safety rules, vices of drinking and driving, etc. I am confident that with further analysis and expert advice I would be able to put forward strong regulations and plan to ensure this problem is eradicated forever for the people of India.   How would you explain the "The Credit Crisis of 2008" to a 12-year-old? USA went into a recession post 9/11. To save people from the recession, the US government lowered the rate at which people can borrow money (interest rates). Now as it was easy to borrow money, people started taking loans to buy houses for which they would do payments regularly.  But the US government later thought that the recession was over now, so they again increased the interest rates. Now people who had bought homes over loans have to do payments at a higher rate than what they bought. So now as most people did not have money to pay back their loans at a higher rate, they allowed banks to take back their houses. Now as thousands of people stop paying money, banks had thousands of houses that they gain put for selling. Since so many houses were up for sale at the same time, this means there was too much supply of houses but few wanted it and hence price of the houses fell. Banks were worried about falling prices so they devised a plan. They did not show the real picture to the investors and asked them to bet on these houses saying that people will continue to pay for the loans and they will get money. Which surely did not happen. And ultimately, as people continued to stop paying back, the number of houses on sale kept increasing, which allowing banks to fool more investors and finally when no payments came,  these investors lost a lot of money. So, Investment banks crashed and cumulatively the economy fell. Also as the economy fell, people had even lesser money, so they bought very few goods, so companies faced losses and hence they fired employees which lead to people having even lesser money. Slowly the whole economy fell into a big crisis.