Corona impact: This CEO is locking up veggies like family heirlooms and no longer takes onions & potatoes for granted

When this pandemic passes, we will look at life from a before and after lens. In the after, it will be the small, everyday things that we will no longer take for granted. Manisha Girotra, CEO, Moelis, is already learning this. She shared with ETPanache her experience of the lockdown and how it has changed her.

In the before, when Girotra’s cook called during work hours to say that she had run out of essential items, Girotra found it “distracting”. Cut to today, and she says, “During the day, when I connect with colleagues and clients over Zoom, I mute the call if a supplier calls to tell me that he has managed to source lentils and pulses or washing detergent. Once I get the supplies in, I sanitise the boxes and packets of food items and other essentials, and put them away with as much care as I would lock away jewellery inherited from my grandma.”

These days Girotra eagerly awaits the vegetable vendor, keeping an eye out for him from her daughter’s bedroom window. “Never before has an aerial view of potatoes and onions given me such happiness,” she says.


After one such successful shopping expedition, she took her husband on a tour of the kitchen and showed him all the vegetables they had managed to get. “The delighted look on my face got him worried; he thought I was acting a bit cuckoo,” she says.