Shahnaz Husain maintains that you can't be scared and successful at the same time. And that guiding mantra seems to worked wonders for her. The lady who never dreamt big ended up making customised blue-green kohl for Princess Diana. Having recently bagged the Gr8 Women Achiever Award for entrepreneurship, she is soon going to be US President Barack Obama's special guest at the Summit on Entrepreneurship in early April. She shares her story with CS:



Fresh start

It is difficult to dream big when you are 15-years-old, married and only standard VII pass. At that stage, I could only envision a very boring existence for myself. Feeling the need to study further, I enrolled for the Senior Cambridge programme and much to my surprise, topped the examination! I scored a whopping 98 per cent in English. I had the audacity to write back to my professor asking her where I'd lost two marks and she blamed it on my illegible writing. But jokes apart, it was only after the results that I started feeling a restlessness within to do something. I would scribble on the walls 'I want to do something' but didn't know what. I eventually enrolled in a cosmetic therapy course and specialised in hair loss for men.

Beauty for a cause

When my dad saw all my dimplomas, he said, "You will certainly earn, but it is more important to do something for your after-life." I thought that he was just being morbid when he explained me what he meant with the help of a torch. He turned it on saying, 'Just now it is bright. But overtime it will get dimmer and dimmer." The lesson hit home and I knew that if I wanted to make a difference to the world, I had to do it now. That's when I started a school for the deaf and mute girls in Delhi. Earlier, no one wanted to marry these girls, but once they completed their beauty training and started earning, there was a line of men waiting to marry them.u00a0

Woman on top

People ask me whether I faced any problems while starting out as an entrepreneur, but I say that the problem was that there was no problem. I believe that there is no roadblock that cannot be tackled. This story of women in India not being pushy enough is nonsense. If you want to achieve something, you have to be proactive. You can't be scared and successful at the same time.u00a0