68) Beautician Course

Ritu at 19 is a very confident woman as she avers,” I’m beautiful and I want to make others beautiful too”. For the last 3 years, she has been working as an assistant in a beauty parlour and that has made her an expert in facial and bridal makeup.

She thinks big, “If Shahnaz Hussian can gross over 300 crores, so can we. After all, the size of the cake is getting bigger all the time”.

Ritu Sood has saved over Rs.2 lacs from her savings and plans to do a beautician course in the US while currently doing her graduation by correspondence.

She has come this far by her own enterprise. Her parents had a nasty divorce and that really affected her so much that she wanted to get away from it all. The daily fights and brickbats were taking their toll and showed no signs of abating and that’s when she packed off her bags to Mumbai to her cousin’s place forsaking her beloved Calcutta for good. Since then, she has been very much on her own and these 3 years in the electric city has taught her to be an adult.

To support herself, she started as an assistant in a beauty salon in Andheri and those earnings took care of her lodgings in Borivili. Not wanting to entirely give up on academics, she enrolled for a correspondence course at Mumbai University and now supports herself while dealing with the scars of the past.

She shares diggings with Roma, who is from Sangli and both have stuck a good rapport.

Ritu was very clear from the beginning,” I would be a misfit in a regular job and so college and a MBA course made very little appeal. I wanted to be an entrepreneur and the beauty business offered the best hope. Now, I am learning my ropes and after a certification from an American university, I will be equipped to start my own centre. After a formal degree, even the bankers would be more amenable to my loan requests and studying in America is only an investment”.

She and Roma recently invested Rs.50, 000 in the stock market and made a return of over Rs.25, 000 in a six months period.

She reasoned,” I would be a fool not to invest in the stock market as the Sensex is climbing all the time”.
Roma chips in, “Working here has another advantage. Apart from honing our communication skills, we are a developing a client base. In a service industry, servicing is half the job and building relationship will help us when we start our parlour.”

My newspaper friend said,” Vivek, this is the new confident India. Two girls, one from a broken home and another from a rural background have joined hands in a corrupt metropolis and yet making their own mark”.

I could only say,” Too bloody true”.