When they were pregnant with her, Alisha Moopen’s parents were sure that they were going to have a son and they had even decided on a name—Zubin. When they were blessed with a girl, they kept the name and Alisha was called Zubin for 15 years. “There was a boy in my class who was also called Zubin and I hated it,” says Alisha, deputy managing director of Aster DM Healthcare, one of the largest health care service providers in GCC and India. “I went to my father and requested him to change the name and that is how my name was changed to Alisha. At that time there was a demon playing in my head that I should have been a boy and not a girl.”
Moopen was born in India and grew up in Dubai. She wanted to become a doctor like her father, Dr Azad Moopen, chairman and managing director of Aster DM Healthcare. “But my mother said that to become a doctor I would end up studying for 15 years. ‘When are you going to get married and have babies?’ she asked. So I had to re-route my career choice from being a doctor to becoming a chartered accountant,” says Moopen.
Her mother, however, motivated her to be independent. “On the other hand, my father used to say that I needed to be interdependent as we are one world and we have a lot of interdependencies among each other. Interdependency helps you leverage each other's skillsets whether it's your partner, your husband or your family,” says Moopen.
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Her father had given her the freedom to make career choices. He did not expect her to come back and work with him, and had asked her to find her own journey. In fact, one of her two younger sisters is a doctor. “After I did not become a doctor, my mother told us that one of us could be a doctor,” says Moopen.
She feels that in the end it is one's merit and hard work that take one to places irrespective of background. When she returned from the UK after working there as a consultant, she was going through a rough personal space after a divorce. “I still recall a message someone sent my father saying that if his daughter could not even make her marriage work, why was he trusting her? Such kinds of walls keep coming, but it is important how you play with the demon in your head,” says Moopen.
When she joined the organisation, the leadership team had only a handful of women despite a majority of the workforce being women. “Over the past few years we have decided to create leadership paths irrespective of gender, but making it clear that we also want women on the table. Now our head of HR is a woman, and head of quality and medical affairs is also a woman,” she says.
Moopen is overseeing the strategic direction and development of Aster DM Healthcare and is spearheading the expansion of the group into new markets. The company is present in seven countries and currently employs some 18,890 people, of which around 2,900 are doctors and around 6,400 are nurses.