Priyanka Chopra's Secret Triumph: How the Quantico Star Is Helping Kids Go to School

BDC News

By Erika Hayasaki

America knows Priyanka Chopra as the breakout star of TV’s Quantico. But the story of how she got there—and the kids she’s helping now—will blow you away.

At 16, Priyanka Chopra was a skinny, self-described “nerd” when a group of girls cornered her outside her high school in Newton, Massachusetts. Having grown up in India before moving to the U.S. years earlier, she’d been enduring racial slurs for months: “Brownie, go home!” and “Curry’s walking!” That day two of the girls jumped her. She fought back—hard—until school counselors intervened, but the incident left its mark. “It broke my spirit,” she says. “It made me question who I was. Why was it so uncool being Indian?”
Within two years she’d moved back home, won the Miss India competition, and been crowned Miss World. “I taught myself confidence,” she recalls. “When I’d walk into a room and feel scared to death, I’d tell myself, ‘I’m not afraid of anybody.’ And people believed me. You’ve got to teach yourself to take over the world.” That may explain why Chopra, now 33, is one of Bollywood’s top stars and gaining fans in America at warp speed as FBI recruit (slash terrorist suspect) Alex Parrish in ABC’s Quantico. Chopra—who splits her time between Montreal, where Quantico films, and her home in Mumbai—relishes how the show is pushing boundaries: “Usually with brown girls,” she says, “you only see us as doctors or nurses.”
As for “brown girls” in India? That’s where Chopra’s story gets truly inspiring. Ten years ago, as her career was taking off, she learned that the son of her family’s housekeeper was in school but the daughter was not. So Chopra stepped up to cover the girl’s tuition. “Education has always been very important to me,” she says. “It means you don’t have to depend on anyone else.” Now the actress donates a full 10 percent of her earnings to her own nonprofit, The Priyanka Chopra Foundation for Health and Education, through which, at press time, she was paying for schooling and medical care for 70 children in India—50 of them girls. “I know each kid,” says Chopra. “It’s very personal.”
One of those girls, Rubina Maqbool Ahmed, says Chopra’s impact is profound: “Girls, after a certain age, their parents prefer to have them married off,” says Ahmed, 20, who’s now in college studying computer science and whose sister, thanks to the foundation, is in high school. “But when this opportunity came, my father decided, ‘I will let my daughters get an education.'” Chopra wants to give every girl that chance; as an ambassador for Girl Rising, the global campaign for female education, she’s spreading that mantra throughout India. “Priyanka is one of the most recognizable people on the entire Asian continent,” says Girl Rising CEO Holly Gordon. “It’s impossible to overestimate her power in making it acceptable to send girls to school.”
When Chopra needs a reminder to keep pushing, she looks at a tattoo on her wrist: “Daddy’s lil girl,” it reads. “I used to love the story of Cinderella,” she explains. “My father always told me, ‘You should not want to fit into someone else’s glass slipper. You should shatter the glass ceiling.'” He “instilled confidence in me, and that doesn’t happen for so many kids,” she says. “I can’t eradicate poverty, but at least for the people around me, I can help make sure no child is denied a dream.”