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Good afternoon and thank you and wow!

I am so privileged and so honored to be sharing this afternoon with all of you and these incredibly amazing women that are being honored today.

I'd like to extend my congratulations to each one of you:

Octavia, Michelle, Kelly, Patty, and all fifty women that have been included in the impact report.

Your achievements not just inspire me but also so many others to work harder, to be better, and to make a dent wherever we can.

So I'm very, very proud to be standing alongside of you.

So in life, you know, there are moments when you stop and ask yourself "how did I get here? like why am I standing here?"

Well, this is definately one of those moments for me.

And I find myself going back to the beginning, back to my roots.

I was born to incredible parents, amazing parents who served as doctors in the indian army.

I was the first born.

And as far back as I can remember, I made my parents very proud and happy ninety-nine percent of the time.

Okay, slight exaggerations of personal achievements are allowed from time to time don't you think?

My brother was born as few years later and even then, nothing changed for me.

We were both given equal opportunities and I want to emphasize this, I want to really emphasize this for you because I don't think a lot of people might understand that being equal might seem very normal but where I come from, India, and a lot of developing counties around the world, more often than not, this is an exception.

It's actually a privilage.

My first experience of the glaring disparity between boys and girls came at a very very young age I grew up in a middle class family with extremely philanthropic parents who constantly reminded me and my brother how lucky we were and how giving back to the less fortunate was not a choice, it was a way of life.

Simple.

I was seven or eight years old when my parents started taking me on these visits in a travelling clinic to developing communities around and villages around the city that we lived in called Bareilly.

We were packed into this ambulance and my parents would provide free medical care to people who couldn't afford it.

My job at the age of eight was assistant pharmacist.

So I would count all the medicines, put them in an envelope, and give it out to patients and I really took my job very seriously.

But the more I went on these expeditions, the more I began to notice the simplest things that distingushed a boy from a girl or a man from a woman.

For example, girls were pulled out of school when they hit puberty because they were considered ready for marriage and babies.

The Full Power of Women Speech

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