“Cooking is not gender based. The benefit of learning to cook is that you will end up eating less junk food”. This was told to a packed hall of college students. And, no, this did not come from any master chef, health freak or yoga guru.

Telling them this was India’s first woman IPS officer Kiran Bedi. This was the last and ultimate point among the seven key aspects that she believed one must master before they were 30 years old.

She ensures that her every visit to the GRD School of Commerce and International Business and GRD Institute of Management is a lively one, and the one on Saturday was no less. Her topic for the ‘Face-to-Face’ was timely and one that every student about to leave the portals of college required to know.

Attributing the content of her talk to Jessica Stillman’s online article, Dr. Bedi listed out the seven key aspects that anyone must master before they turned 30.

The first six were as follows: being able to cope with uncertainty, communicating gracefully, respecting the other despite them sharing a diverse opinion, the ability to ask for help as and when one may need it, being resilient, and learning to spend money and time carefully.

Giving equal importance to each aspect, she said that if they started practising these in their lives, they would become like Ph.D. holders in these by the time they turned 30.

After her share of talking, it was the turn of the students. They had a rapid fire round of questions for Ms. Bedi, which she, in her indomitable style, handled with élan.

She shared her life slogan with the students: “Value time and money all the way. For me time is money.”

She left them with two sayings from her parents. Her father’s being, “Life is an incline. Either you come up or you go down”. Her mother’s being, “Kiran, grow up to give”.