NEW DELHI: Malini Agarwal, creator of brand MissMalini, has come out with her first book in which she describes her journey and how she took blogging and entertainment journalism to new heights.
"#To The Moon" is Malini's mantra and her story. Full of wit, she tells the readers how to get to the top and stay there.
When she first moved to Mumbai nearly two decades ago, she had two suitcases, one friend, and lived in an apartment with six girls and a pigeon.
"And every single night this suicidal bird would fly around the living room, where I slept on the floor, threatening to impale itself on the ceiling fan as I cowered under a bed sheet. My rent was Rs 625 and Facebook hadn't been invented yet," says Malini.
"All I had was an alpha numeric pager and a headful of dreams. But I wanted my life to be extraordinary and something told me that Mumbai city, with all its kitschy neon lights and leopard print taxis, was where that was going to happen," she adds.
The book, published by HarperCollins India, is receiving endorsements on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram from celebrities like Deepika Padukone, Hrithik Roshan, Mika Singh, Diana Penty, Soha Ali Khan, Swara Bhasker, Neha Dhupia, Aditi Rao Hydari and many others.
The book has a foreword by Priyanka Chopra.
"I connect with Malini because carving your own path is one of my strongest beliefs," she writes in the foreword.
At the end of each chapter, MissMalini provides tips like "Giving up on one dream doesn't make you a quitter. Quitting dreaming does", "be kind, even to your competition” and many more.
There is also a section titled 'The A-Z of Digital Entrepreneurship' - from WordPress to Facebook, from Twitter to Instagram, from hashtags to emoji - on how to make one's presence felt on the Internet.
"I believe that everyone has a book in them, but finding the words to tell the story is always the hardest part.
"People ask me why I say #tothemoon all the time. It's because I loved how it was used frequently in the Leonardo DiCaprio film 'Catch Me If You Can' and in the song 'Fly me to the moon' by Frank Sinatra, and of course in every other Bollywood love song," she says.