Swarleen Kaur and Shefali Chopra recently joined NewsX for an exclusive interview for its special segment NewsX A-List. Swarleen Kaur is an author and the founder and CEO of a platform called Talk Room, while Shefali Chopra is a storyteller and a TedX speaker.
Swarleen started by talking about Talk Room. “As the name suggests, Talk Room is all about ‘talking’. Talk suggests, we converse, we communicate and we confer. Being a personality development coach and being an educator for a long time now, I was thinking of students and the youth of our country, that how important it is to build our personality, how important it is to communicate. Once I was out in Ludhiana. I saw a drawing-room in a furniture shop and then I saw the reading room. I said I’m going to build the Talk Room and here we are going to talk sense, we are going to talk about opening our hearts and you know much about learning, how to talk.
So that’s Talk Room all about and how it is,” she said.Shefali got associated with the Talk Room and Swarleen during the pandemic. She said, “I met Swarleen during pandemic itself and we got into a conversation or as Swarleen says, we got into ‘talking’ and then we realised that we have a similar passion. I am a storyteller, I am a motivational speaker and a TEDx speaker too, I am a theatre exponent and I realised I too could contribute a lot to the Talk Room. We also realised we have a similar value system and ethics too. I mean that’s how our bond became stronger by the day.”
Sharleen spoke about a project that turned out as a watershed moment in her business. She said, “The International Children’s Summit actually came from children only. I was taking their class and they were sitting and talking about their annual days and the fates, all this going on in their school in the month of November and how they missed it. So we just had a talk with the team and they said that let’s create it for them and there were almost 40 to 50 students who volunteered to be hosts and the student panels and we could see the excitement back. Then, we started to talk about it to many educators and they said that it was a wonderful idea and they gave us a green signal and they wanted their schools to be associated with us. That’s how this International Summit came to being actually, but the main focus was to tell the children that whether it is pandemic or any kind of difficulty, the only thing that matters is, don’t stop because if the youth stops, you know the nation stops. The major thing was to motivate them that whatever the situation is, we can just bring back our good times, again and again.”
Speaking about the impact of Covid-19 on the functioning of events, Shefali said, “There has been a lot of impacts but we realised when we started doing this session, the Children Summit, we had about 8 countries participating with us, children coming from 8 countries, we had more than 60 panellists, we had a great jury, we had amazing people who joined as our chief guests. So, there was no looking back for us. I think, suddenly the world became small and actually if you ask me this is the time to learn every day. I always say we learn every day, we unlearn and we relearn. So, that is our mantra and we are not going to quit, so definitely, don’t quit.”
Explaining Talk Room’s vision, Swarleen said, “We devised a plan beneath LSRW, which stands for Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing. When children pass out class 12, they look for IELTS course when they have to go abroad. So we thought of implanting it at the right age, children from class 2 to 3 have also started to do this course and we are so happy that we are already catering students from Singapore, Dubai, Japan and also from Riyadh.”
Further, Swarleen spoke about who all can benefit from the Talk Room. “It’s for the youth, corporates, trainers, women and it’s for any housewife sitting at home thinking that she can’t do it. Let me tell you, we all can do it. So it’s for everyone who wants to learn communication, we do stress at youth because they are the nation builders and they definitely look ahead to get into something that they’re lacking in. So, everyone who comes to us is going to benefit in one or the other way,” said Swarleen.
Adding to what Swarleen said, Shefali expressed, “It’s for everybody and especially for those who think they missed out on doing something they really wanted to do, this is a good time. All such people should come here and rediscover themselves.”