Debashree Bhowmick

I would say a lot of my success has to be the hard work and sacrifice that my parents have made in bringing me up over the years. I grew up ethnically Indian, but I was based in the Middle East for almost 27-28 years. For my parents to have taken the step to immigrate to an absolutely unknown land, start a family, and work hard every day in sickness, in health, in bad weather, in good weather - it didn't matter. Their sacrifice, their love, their commitment, their diligence is something that I worship. I do have my own wings and I fly around, but they are the wind beneath my wings. I lost my mother to cancer 11 years ago, and life has changed since then, and perspectives are different now. But had it not been for both of them, I wouldn't be where I am today.

One of the best pieces of career advice I've ever received came from a colleague I worked with in the Middle East. He told me that you may be the best orator in the world, you may be the best writer in the world, and your command on a certain language or discipline may be wonderful - nobody doubts that. But always remember the audience that you're talking to. If you are a grammar expert, that's great, you're a wonderful speaker of the English language, but if you have an audience that only studied up until elementary grade and then went into professional services, maybe they don't need that kind of complexity. It's extremely important that you curate your language so that your audience understands. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day how good your skill is - the idea is that you convey it to the target audience. In the service industry, it's extremely important that you speak the language that your audience understands, not the one that you know best.

I'll be very straight and very candid about it. A lot of people would say the world is what you make out of it, and maybe to an extent that's not true. When you walk into an office, when you walk into your workplace, when you walk into the field, there will be a lot of people who'll raise eyebrows and doubt you just because you happen to be a woman. Maybe it's the age, maybe it's the ethnicity, maybe it's the way you dress up - there would be a lot of question marks. My only advice to women would be: become independent. Become educated. It's very important that you make your own decisions in life. Make sure that you're financially settled, and financial settlement doesn't come when you take on your father's or your spouse's name - it happens when you do it by yourself. It's extremely important that women need to have their own finances in their own hands. Once the woman or the girl in the family starts working, things change for the better. So go out there, go through the grind, do whatever is necessary to teach yourself, but be independent. You can manage relationships much better if you understand what independence - emotional independence and financial independence - means. You're a better counterpart because on your deathbed, the only thing which is never going to turn around and ask you what have you done for me is your career. So work hard to make one.

In my work life, I think it's very important that work ethic comes first, and second is integrity. We always face the dilemma where you have Person X who's very nice but not as efficient, and then you have Person B who is extremely skillful but is an absolute pain to work with. This is a trade-off that most of us have to balance in our daily life at our workplaces. I think the most important trait would be work ethic and integrity. If somebody shows up to work during hard times and good times, and that's what they're supposed to be doing, there needs to be no attachment or love to your work - it just has to be duty. Discipline is very important. So I'd say work ethic, discipline, and integrity are extremely important when you show up at the workplace.