A tete-a-tete with Rasika Wakalkar reveals her go-getter attitude towards life
A tete-a-tete with Rasika Wakalkar reveals her go-getter attitude towards life"Iu00a0believe in making my own destiny and not regretting my decisions," says Rasika Wakalkar. Considering she has switched careers so often for someone so young, it is a pragmatic statement that gives you an insight into her philosophy.
Armed with a Bachelor of French Literature from Fergusson College and a diploma in French from Alliance Francaise, Rasika was all set to follow a career in the Indian Foreign Services or the UN as an interpreter. However, life had other plans for her.
She got married very young, and life took another trajectory. She got involved in the family business ufffd education ufffd and running the Indira schools, at the same time completing a degree in Marketing Management from Indira. Setting up the institute alongside husband Chetan and his sister Tarita was challenging, and the trio worked many hours at the school.
Apart from helping Chetan as his deputy, she also founded and ran the Indira magazine, Tapasya, and helped set up Indira Kids, the school for children, from playgroup to senior KG.
Rasika fondly recollects those early years. "Whatever I have done in life, I have enjoyed heart and soul," says she.
After the birth of her second child, she decided to slow down. The school was on autopilot and she was not really required to be there. It was then that she resurrected plans for another one of her dreams: running a design studio.
The desire had been incubating for years, but Rasika felt the city was not ready yet and the concept of her store, Rudraksh, would not have worked if she had begun it earlier.
She put to use her marketing skills and conceptualised her idea for the store.
Fashion had been on her mind since 2000, while she was studying French in Paris. She spent a long time observing French women and the effortless way in which they put together their look. In her opinion, Indian women do not put as much thought behind their looks as the French do, and she was desirous of bringing about a change in this attitude. A keen student of French history, Rasika asserts that the French have been in the forefront of setting fashion trends since the days of Louis IV with the trendy hairstyle and big coats.
The city had no place with the right ambience for fashion conscious women to shop. Everyone went to Mumbai or Delhi. The marketing graduate saw the demand-supply mismatch and realised the need to channelise the abundant disposable income of Punekars into a store, catering to their demands. It was a logical progression to the booming social life of the city.
Rasika is particular about the garments and accessories she stocks, looking into every item coming into the shop. She keeps in mind the particular requirements of the city clientele when she attends fashion weeks as a buyer.u00a0
She also has a social conscience and endorses designers who have taken a stand, such as those using eco-friendly fabric, those promoting weavers and artisans in remote villages or the ones helping save the silkworm.
While fashion is considered a glamorous field, she knows the amount of hard work and dedication put in by various designers and gets annoyed when people dismiss this industry as being frivolous.
Her social consciousness has led to her donning another hat as the chairperson of Young Indians, a part of the Confederation of Indian Industry. Young Indians works as a socially conscious organisation working towards the betterment of India on the whole, by facilitating various projects.u00a0
To sum up in her own words, "Si c'est le dieu qui me donne ma vie alors je voudrais lui faire fier don't je la mene. J'aime se coucher avec une conscience Claire (If it is God who has given me this life, I would like to be happy the way I have led it, I like to sleep with a clear conscience)."
All she is doing is following her dream.
