For the 19-year old Chhavi Verg, a business major at Rutgers University, life just opened up a whole new set of possibilities, when she became Miss New Jersey USA 2017 this Oct. 16. The pageant was held in the Hilton Parsippany Hotel, in Parsippany, N.J. One of the youngest among some 80 contestants competing for this title, Verg is the first Indian-American to win the pageant and will now represent her state at the Miss USA pageant in 2017.
Right now, she is still getting her head around the victory. “It doesn’t register in your brain – in a second you are transformed from a normal girl to Miss New Jersey USA! It’s unbelievable. It’s a big psychological adjustment,” she told Desi Talk.
She is also determined to demolish stereotypes that may exist about the Indian-American community. “There’s a generalization about them (Indian-Americans) as if they can only do certain things in a certain way,” she noted. “Don’t be a victim of these stereotypes. Break these stereotypes. That’s what I want,” she asserted.
When she was crowned, she was “shocked” she said. “I did my walk in a daze, but then I heard the girls shouting my name, “Chhavi, Chhavi” and they came and hugged me,” she recalls. “Someone who has worked in many pageants told me they had never seen that kind of response among the contestants before.”
In her second year at Rutgers University where she is also a marketing assistant-director in the Rutgers University Programming Association, and is involved in Women BUILD, a group that helps prepare women leaders in business. Verg told the university newspaper, The Daily Targum, how hard she prepared for this competition and how she aspired to win pageants since her high-school days. Her business studies, she noted, taught her the ‘5- Ps’ — “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance,” words she has lived by over the last year.
Outside of school, Verg enjoys dancing and is a proponent of health and wellbeing. A Bharatanatyam dancer who completed her Arangetram in 2013, Verg believes that one of the most important things in life is good health. She started a website to spread that message. She believes “Success is a team effort” and advises others to “Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.”
Asked how she would meet the demands of her courses at school and the responsibilities of being Miss New Jersey USA 2017, Verg took a deep breath. “It’s all about time management. My friends have been such a big help in all this. And my family,” she noted. While the title is not making too many demands on her as yet, she said, “I’m still sometimes in doubt if it was a reality or a dream,” she said.
“I’m seeing it as an opportunity of being able to make a difference using my position – giving back to my community, to children and for women’s empowerment.”
Her parents are ecstatic. “We are so happy, we can’t put it in words,” her father Ravi Verg told Desi Talk. “She is a very hardworking girl and speaks several languages including Mandarin and Spanish,” he added.
“I am so proud of her. As her mother I always knew she was very mature for her age. This title makes me even prouder,” her mother Meera Gupta Verg told DesiTalk. “And it makes me even prouder of this country,” she added, “Most of the other contestants were white, but we did not see even a hint of partiality in how the event was handled,” she said.
Born in India and brought up in New Jersey, Verg loves regularly visiting India to see her grandparents and the extended family.
The post The Five ‘P’s Of Miss New Jersey USA Chhavi Verg appeared first on News India Times.