The Woman Who Dared To Dream
Meet Diipa Khosla, 29: the first Indian influencer to make it big internationally. Here’s how she is using her clout to change lives too
“If anyone had been able to tell a pimpled little girl that she would be the first Indian influencer to walk the Cannes Film Festival or have her picture on a billboard in Piccadilly Circus as the face of Maybelline… If anyone had told that teenager afraid of speaking in public or in English, that one day she would address the British House of Commons on International Women’ s Day, she would never have believed a word of it!”
This is not a monologue from a forthcoming film. These are the words of a young woman who dared to dream and now lives that dream every day. With more than a million followers on Instagram @diipakhosla, as many ass even international magazine covers, and the title of Influencer of the Year for three consecutive years by Vogue,Elle andGrazia, Diipa Büller-Khosla is definitely on a roll.
Though her chosen role in life has made her dreams come true, Diipa thinks that the word ‘influencer’ is somewhat misused at this time. “I would much rather be called a new-age digital celebrity,” the 34-yearold says. “You can be an influencer only if you have managed to influence people so much that it has led to some kind of a social change.”
But she’s being too self-deprecating, we think. Based in the Netherlands, Diipa was in India earlier this year in February as a TED speaker, and it’s obvious that she has actually brought about a social change in her own way because she uses her clout to work with the UN and other NGOs to champion female empowerment and the anti-racism cause.
THE MAKING OF CLOUT
Born in a traditional Punjabi family, Diipa spent the first six years of her life in Delhi before her parents decided to shift to Chen nai first and afterwards to Ooty, where she went to a British boarding school. Keen to study law abroad, she won a full scholarship that
GOING GLOBAL took her to the Netherlands.
After finishing a bachelor’s degree in international human rights law, Diipamoved to London for her masters. In a four-month break between university and a job as a full- fledged lawyer, she got herself an internship at a fashion agency in London.
“To my utter surprise, it turned out to be Europe’s first influencer agency!” she says. “I knew nothing about this world, yet on my third day in the sales team, I was closing huge deals with fashion brands like Mango and Kiara.”
Diipa began to understand the kind of power an influencer wields, and how, if used wisely, it could be a great business module.
“At that time, almost all the influencers came from the US and Europe, and it struck me that there was no Indian representing us in the global beauty and fashion space,” she says. “I realised that if I could do this, I could totally change the whole influencer game.”
WOULD MUCH RATHER BE CALLED A NEW-AGE DIGITAL CELEBRITY” –DIIPA KHOSLA
COLOUR OF SUCCESS
That was four years ago. She began as just any other brown girl, but in three years she had 1.1 million followers, has posed