Break the Stereotypes | Pankhuri Gidwani | TEDxNIITUniversity

you hello everyone so as the person introduced me I am banking Advani Miss Grandin year 2015 and I'm also studying Bachelors of mass media at MIT by college so every time I go on to give my introduction to someone in a social gathering it's very complicated because I say okay hi I'm Pond Creek Advani miss Grandin Oh amazing so what you're doing right now I'm shooting in ads and also doing college college so then when did you win I wonder when I was eighteen year old Oh amazing then we turn off college first year of college then how you know you should be in second year says okay let's do it from the beginning and now today TEDx has given me the chance to do it from the beginning to the end and I'm a thankful for that thank you and IIT University so I was always the kind of person who never had stretched right I know it sounds a little boasting but it was just like that it was in the family my family was into music my family was always up there out there on the stage I was speaking about something so my father is a journalist and my mom is into cosmetology and my daddy is a very good singer so we were always um you would say in non-conventional couriers from my family background and I was always interested into doing a lot of things at one point of time yet keep my one thing as my priority so for example in school my academics were my priority but I would still go into a lot of activities at that point of time and here we see I started learning Kathak at the age of four and that was something that helped me to get out of my comfort zone and also get on the stage and be like yes I can do this you know every time I would do a Kathak performance I would get better and better at it and after a point of time I was always at the center of the stage and a center of abstraction so it was was very exciting and enthusiastic for me to be on stage and be admired by the people and be appreciated by the people and at the same time my mom would always keep drilling this into me you know aha mommy mother oh you know it's okay so okay people are appreciating that's good but you need to stay down to earth so that always helped me and since the age of yes I also play the drums and that was something that really helped me increase my confidence because you usually don't see dainty conventionally pretty looking girls playing the drums right so harsh truth there is but this is something that really made me step out of the league of the dainty looking girls and helped me develop my confidence a lot so I started modeling at the age of 16 and this was something that was a very bold step for me to take I belong to Lucknow which is also known as a small city and the city of Nawabs and it was a stereotype that was there that small city girls do not take part in glamorous activities I think a lot of you might have phased it you know when you take part in fashion events or when you feel you know I want to do this photo shoot and then this tag comes oh no you're a small city girl why do you want to get into this glamour world and I'd only wanted to break the stereotype and wanted to encourage other girls also to follow what they liked and not go by what traditionally this should do so I started modeling at 16 and my parents were in full support of whatever I wanted to do so there I have been very very lucky when it comes to family support so when I turned 18 I went to participate in this competition called campus princess and to be very honest I was only giving it a shot like I don't have this in mind okay I'm going to become sindhya or I'm going to become the next Bollywood star I just wanted to try something new and be adventurous in life which I think all of us should have in us because if we just go by the traditional people and by what you should do distantly do and what should happen in your life you know you should first do your schooling then do your higher education and then and get into a job have a family and that's about it no I wanted to break that I wanted to try new things and see what I was good at and hence their drums and hence the modeling and hence the campus princess when I won campus princess I was like okay now this is something I'm good out at this is something I enjoy doing and when I was asked the questions by the mentors over there by the previous Miss India I was thoroughly enjoying the entire experience because I was getting attention I was getting admiration at the same point of time I was able to express my views which I did since I was a small kid and hence I won this and I was told that now you need to prepare for Miss India which was I needed to prepare with the beauty with the purpose I needed to tone my body as you can see this is different and this is different and I also needed to be very intellectually smart because at the age of 18 you're naive you don't know what you're speaking where you're speaking and how you're speaking so all of this had to come and this was on November 21st and as you all know abodes happen in February later every March so it was all that preparation along with my examine examination preparation that I had to do and then the Miss India pageant began before that there's a backstory to this I had to win the campus princess pageant together direct entry into the 21 finalists of Miss India and so I gave to off my boards in February and then there was a 20 day gap to my next exam and this mr. campus princess was happening during that time so I thought let's give it a try again this was again a try and something adventurous that I was trying to do there was nothing concrete so if I would win well I would go forth with the pageant if I would lose I can come back and study so there was nothing to lose basically so I went forth to do this pageant and I won campus princess and got a direct entry into the 21 finalists of Miss India so when that happened you know there are some times when you feel that the destiny is opening doors for you for something that you so want to do and you're so determined to do that was what exactly was happening with me and I learnt that we have to face challenges bang on when they come in front of you challenges will always come and expectedly you can't be thinking that bataki I go Kia Chama domain name an animal that's not going to happen you're going to get challenges like this and you have to face them and you have to make a choice for good of a bad so the pageant started and there were a lot of rounds there were there was a fashion round there was a national costume round there were a lot of sponsor visits that we did and for a 18 year old who's not even clear at school it's pretty exciting it's an entry into the glamor world and all the people are around you this paparazzi buzzing around you you have to keep speaking on the social media and it was all good fun but with that there are people who will try to pull you down there are people who will share everything with you and there are girls who don't want to share their makeup with you because they don't want you to be looking beautiful right so there was a lot of form position among the girls as well as if you go to make friends there were wonderful friends so you had to choose between what you wanted to do and who you want it to be and yes being youthful is of course one of the criteria so being a Miss India but being beautiful at heart is the biggest criteria I tell you today so we had a bikini shoot also in Mason and as you know it's such a I don't know it's such a stereotype thing that you know girl doing bikini shoot oh my god characterless that's what we hear from a lot of people but again I wanted to break this stereotype too and I wanted me like know hey if I am confident of my body does not mean that I have a loose character if they are requiring a bikini shoot for me it's for glamor I mean who doesn't like a glamorous picture who doesn't like to be you know noticed by the people but of course in a good way so I broke that - you're right - to move forward and then came the finale in which mr. Shah Rukh Khan himself announced the names of the winners and it was a dream come true for me it was a dream come true for my entire family because all this while they had been backing me they had been supporting me all my friends were like you are only going to win this year - chill you're going to win so I did my best I was just who I was during the entire pageant I mean you can't fake it for one month right and it was nothing scripted like it is in most of the reality shows so it was just the real new coming out and that's when I won Miss India in 2016 April I still remember that day when I went home and I was just thinking oh my god what's next so this was next I was chosen for Miss grand international which is one of the top five international pageants that you have and it was the great challenge to begin with most of the contestants who come from his grand international are already a part of some other pageant so they've already experienced a lot of pageants and I was one of the youngest people in fact after Priyanka Chopra I was the second person who went for an international pageant at the age of 80 and it was thank you and it was such a big challenge for me but then he again I had learned to face and take challenges as they came so I said okay let's do this so this is a picture from one of my training sessions then there was a ramp walk session which would go on to 2 to 3 hours and you when you're walking in those seven inches heels and it's very tiring and apart from that yes you have to follow a good diet it's not to make you anorexic it's just to keep you in good health about and then you go for your diction sessions your hair session your makeup session and with all of that the biggest pressure was to always look beautiful always behave perfect and it's so difficult to do that right I mean when you get up in the morning and you go to the gym you don't want to look like a superstar but you have to there is no choice people are looking up to you you can't be acting like a normal 18 year old you hold a certain title and a certain responsibility to it but the sad part was that I got diagnosed with jaundice right one week before my pageant and somehow with the help of my mother with the help of my organization who trained me so well I got over it enough to at least go and attend my pageant and give my best at it I was not totally well when I was in Las Vegas us-a when I was representing India it was my first international trip but you can't let people down who've been backing you up all the time so here I was at the Miss grand international I met delegates from all over the world you can see there's Miss China Missy Rock Miss Egypt and this was one of my favorite pictures at the Las Vegas Nevada sign and even there you have all these drones where you have responsible you have your dance practices and something or the other is happening you having visits to different places in Las Vegas which you need to promote as the ambassador of the pageant and if you can promote that then of course you can promote their motto which was to stop the war so it was at a time when the terrorism had become a very famous war throughout social media and hence the motto of the pageant was to stop the war and I loved it and and therefore I went for this pageant specifically meeting people of different countries just makes so much difference to your life and teaches you so much I mean I believe I grew up four years in the one year that I spent with my Miss India pageant and Miss grand international pageant because you learned so much about their life and you come to know that it's not you lose facing challenges there are a number of people who are facing it and you need to keep learning from them in order to improve your own self then okay I got one of the top 25 positions out of 80 countries in misery on international but unfortunately going to win it and I had to come back to study as a school girl not as glamorous I look at this but in the same uniform as these little kids are wearing to give my examinations I had missed my boards for Miss India right I told that I gave only two exams and I came from Miss India so I had to go back give my boards and for those few months for six months coming down from a glamour field where everybody is surrounding you where you are of prime importance to the place where you are a normal school girl again was very very difficult there was of course the jaundice hadn't died out fully so that was also sort of troubling me and because of applying so much makeup in such a young age I had got a really bad skin so that brought down my morale and thirdly I was going through bad phase in a romantic relationship so there were three problems that I was facing at one point of time and I was all alone over there because I had no friends all my friends had gone to respective University and though I had achieved so much I felt I had come or you're behind everyone that was a very very crucial and a very difficult period to pass through but then yes positive thinking helped me and my parents were there with me my friends contacted me they came to visit me from different places and I was able to get over with it and then comes when I won in the sense I got ninety seven point two five marks in my eye exams dad was a break-even point for me I mean I was so happy that all the stress and all the challenges that I had gone through it had resulted into this the story not there was scoop poop and all of these people were covering me as they had never covered me even when I read become a Miss India like I think I got more popular when I got ninety seven point two five marks because it was such a paradoxical thing for them Oh missing acne marks like Yaga kissing so again one more senior type broken which is that beautiful girls become Miss India do it because they can't study or do it because they have no future in academics hey who said that so I wanted to do that too a lot of people and this happened with me yes you can see the social media coverage so yes after that the journey never ended it was always on and on I went on to become one of the 50 most desirable women in India and apart from that I also have done a few ads where I was working with Ranveer Singh and I was with a great team of directors and it's always been up up and up but let me tell you it has been through ups and downs that this upping is now happening also I had got the chance to be featured on the Femina cover with mr. Shah Rukh Khan he's a wonderful person and this is my favorite picture I also got to become the brand ambassador of one zero nine zero women power helpline which is a helpline which helps girls and women who are in distress at any point of time to contact the police and they will be there in no time so I had only wanted to help that cause and I ins I became the ambassador for it and apart from that my beauty with the purpose project was to help people get sanitation in villages and hence I met Ben - for par talk and try to collaborate with them as to what can be done in the burthen a village of QP so I came to know that I could use my image in various places and at various points of time to forward a particular purpose and a particular thing because you know if a normal person says you know it's good to plant trees well okay it's good to plant trees but if a known person says you should plant trees you think twice okay if this person is doing it I should do it and hence I tried that my image gets attached to various purposes so that I can also do some better and my for the country okay one last thought that I would like to leave you with so it was my journey from a schoolgirl to a girl who did a lot of activities - Oh Miss India - Oh miss grande India back to school girl and again back into the glamor industries I feast number of challenges which again I want to remind you face them head-on secondly have your priority is very clear in life know what you're doing for example if I am concentrating of my both it's my boats if I'm concentrating on miss grand international it's my grand international you can't focus on ten things at one point of time and thirdly do not have energy vampires around you when you have positive people around you you tend to be more positive and when you have energy snapping people around you you tend to go down last thought I would leave you with is have your head in the skies and you will be a successful person and have your feet to the ground so that your good person and of course you see the height benefit thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 232,040

Rating: 4.7975607 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Achievement, Beauty, Fashion, Intelligence, Women

Id: XmE4mk8x00s

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 28 2018