It was the next morning, says Manasvi Mamgai, the new Pantaloons Femina Miss India World 2010, that she realised that she had won the crown and become a Miss India. The winning moment, she says, was a blur – “That split second when you don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” is how she describes it. “You’ve worked hard for something and you’ve wanted it for so long, and it’s a childhood dream, so when you get it, you suddenly don’t know what to do. You’re so overwhelmed; you don’t know how to react. I just screamed on stage. That night, we were so tired that it took time to sink in ke achha, oh, I’ve done it. When I woke up next morning and saw the crown in my room, that’s when I was like, oh God, I’ve actually done it!”
YES, I CAN What was the experience of the whole contest like – gruelling, educative or fun? “It was a mix of them all. This year, it was longer. Usually, it’s about 25-30 days, but this year, it was 40 days. We had our fun times too – we went to Lavasa, we did adventure sports, we went to Goa, to Sula… But then, of course, it’s a contest, so it was gruelling too. We had those hectic schedules where we had to jump from one thing to another, manage 5-10 things a day – ramp, speech, the works. We were also homesick – it had its emotional ups and downs as well,” Manasvi reminisces.
For her final question, she was asked what she’d learnt from the contest, and her winning answer was all about self-belief. “We’ve learnt a lot,” Manasvi elaborates. “There was the emotional aspect. We went to crèches and NGOs, etc, we learnt what life is really about, apart from all the glamour. And then there was the grooming, training; but what I actually learnt from the contest and what was also my final answer, was that in the ups and downs, there are times when you want to give up, you lose hope, you wanna go back home… Even in those times, you have to believe in yourself, keep going, fighting back, keep that self-belief. I learnt to believe in myself and just keep going,” she says.
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