Everybody’s life has a direction. It may not always be predictable—and this is certainly a lesson we have learned during the COVID-19 pandemic—but most people have a fair idea of the direction their life will take when they reach adulthood. It’s just the way we are brought up, no matter what our cultural background, region of origin, or gender. Most parents and guardians teach us that there are certain goals related to career, lifestyle, etc that we must select in life and work towards. The most common one is a career.
Whether you got to choose it of your own accord or were pushed into it by well-meaning, if forceful, parents, a career is something all of us are expected to have. And yes, even homemakers have a career, except that they don’t get paid in money and function more on the levels of barter. But selecting what you will do with all your time in life is one of the biggest choices we make, and it gives us perhaps the greatest defining direction in life.
Most of us tend to make that selection on the cusp of adulthood, and stick to it until at least the moment of retirement. Some, however, take the less beaten path. Somewhere down the line, they realise there is something else out there for them, a fresh start in a direction they didn’t think about before. These people with a high-risk appetite grasp this opportunity to switch careers, and quite a few of them make it so big that their names go down in the annals of history. The following are some such women whose career switch brought them unmitigated success.
Julia Child
You might not have watched Julie & Julia, but there are very few people on earth who love everything to do with food and haven’t heard the name of Julia Child. Born and brought up in California, Child moved to New York to work as a copywriter, and then joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as a typist and research assistant. She married the love of her life, Paul Child, in 1946, and the couple moved to Paris in 1948. That’s where Child started her illustrious gourmet food career—she passed Le Cordon Bleu in 1951, published her famous cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961, and launched a very successful television career that made her a household name.
Victoria Beckham
Think Victoria Beckham and you’ll know what having two successful careers looks like. The English singer-songwriter who garnered global fame as Posh Spice, one of the members of the famous 1990s best-selling band, Spice Girls, married David Beckham in 1999. Two years later, the Spice Girls split up, and Beckham released a couple of solo singles and had a few unreleased albums too. Clearly, her music career wasn’t going far at this stage, but that’s when Beckham entered the world of fashion and soon became a global icon. She launched her label, Victoria, in 2008, which started out as a low-key, low-priced brand. By 2012, her brand was quite popular all over the world. This success apart, Beckham has also committed her brand as a fur-free and free of all exotic animal skins one, and also launched her beauty brand which is also cruelty-free.
Mahua Moitra
This Indian woman is quite the firebrand and arguably the most inspiring, sensible voice in Indian politics right now. Born in Assam in 1974 in a Bengali family, Moitra was brought up in Kolkata and graduated in economics and mathematics from Mount Holyoke College in 1998. She then worked as an investment banker at JP Morgan Chase in New York and London, and rose to the rank of vice-president—a position she quit in 2009 to return to India and join politics, in what was clearly a drastically different career switch. She initially joined the Indian National Congress, but moved to Trinamool Congress in 2010. She was elected to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in 2016, and elected a member of parliament to the Lok Sabha in 2019, after winning her seat in West Bengal’s Krishnanagar. In November 2021, she was appointed the TMC’s Goa in charge for the 2022 Goa Legislative Assembly elections.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez
American or not, everybody who knows anything about American politics must have come across the name Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as AOC. Born and brought up in New York, she studied at Boston University, and worked as a bartender, waitress, for a non-profit and as an organiser for the Bernie Sanders Presidential Campaign in 2016. Believing like most that only the wealthy can run for public office, AOC never thought of it as a career choice, until she got a call from Brand New Congress and challenged Joe Crowley for her city’s 14th congressional district Democrats seat in 2018. In 2019, at the age of 29, she was elected as the youngest woman ever to serve at the US Congress. Since then, AOC has become a youth icon who fights for women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, medicare for all, taxation of the rich and many other critical issues. Her new career might still be fresh, but AOC has left a global mark with her never-back-down attitude and inspiring story.
Twinkle Khanna
Daughter of two brilliant Indian actors, Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia, Twinkle Khanna made her very famous Hindi film debut with Barsaat in 1995—a movie that every 1990s kid remembers even today, for sure. Her career in films looked promising indeed, and she married Akshay Kumar in 2001. Khanna has revealed in innumerable interviews that by that time, she knew she didn’t enjoy her career in movies anymore. In 2002, she launched her interior design store, The White Window, and has met with moderate success in the field since. But this wasn’t the only career switch Khanna made. She started writing columns for Daily News and Analysis and the Times of India, and soon, the world discovered that she’s quite the witty writer too! Her first book, Mrs Funnybones, came out in 2015, and she has authored two more books since. Khanna now juggles two careers instead of the one.