Shireena Shroff Manchharam

By Chad Laws (AES Communications Specialist)

Shireena Shroff Manchharam arrived in Delhi already well-traveled. She was born in Kobe, Japan, the latest link in a family chain that had left India two generations earlier — her grandfather had emigrated to Japan after WWII, and even her father, though Indian, had barely visited the country before his company transferred him there. Shireena was in sixth grade when the family landed in Delhi and enrolled at AES. She arrived, by her own account, with almost no confidence at all.

"I was the shyest, most introverted kid," she says. "I could barely say my name."

There was only one thing she felt she could do, so she did it: she tried out for the swim team.

Finding Her Stroke

She didn't know she was walking into anything significant. "I had no life, I had no friends," she says of those early middle-school practices. "I don't think I even knew what I was trying out for. I just swam and went to practice." But something took hold. By ninth grade, she'd improved considerably; by eleventh and twelfth, she was team captain. Her younger sister followed her onto the team a few years later — and eventually became captain herself.

Presiding over all of it was Lisa File, the American coach who ran the AES swim program, and who Shireena now calls, without hesitation, the single biggest mentor of her life. When Shireena's grades in economics started slipping, it was File who intervened — not with a lecture, but with an unmistakable vote of confidence. "She told me, 'We need you. You have to do better, and I'll talk to the counselor, the principal, whatever it takes — you're going to get through this,'" Shireena remembers. "It wasn't that I wasn't trying. I just wasn't that strong in economics. But she had my back."

That belief outlasted the pool. Decades later, Shireena still writes about File in the publications she contributes to, still cites her on panels about mentorship, and still stays in touch — File has visited Shireena in Singapore and watched her daughter's swimming lessons. "I don't have a hundred stories about AES," Shireena says. "But this one is so big, so powerful, that it's basically become what I do."

One Thing, Then a Hundred Others

After AES, Shireena went to Carleton University in Ottawa — a decision made with characteristic lack of fuss. She and her best friend from AES simply agreed they'd go wherever the other one got in; they both got into Carleton, and that settled it. A year of studying business in Spanish followed in Madrid before Shireena returned to Delhi, then took a recruitment job that sent her to Singapore in 2006. She met her husband there, spent three years in Hong Kong (where her daughter, Lara, was born), and eventually settled back in Singapore, where her son, Arian, arrived.

Her career has taken almost as many turns as her childhood geography. For seven years, she ran a handbag line in Singapore, collaborating with design students at local universities to create pieces she had no formal training to design herself — the appeal, she says, was less about the product than the chance to hand young designers a real opportunity. She closed the business in 2020, recertified in wellbeing coaching, and threw herself into what has become her main work: one-on-one and corporate life coaching, as well as a significant volume of youth mentoring tied to Singapore's growing mental-health movement. Shireena created Getting to Happy™, a box set of cards designed to help people live a happier, healthier life. She also worked with a collaborator to produce a series of books, 31 Ways to Live Happier, aimed at adults, kids, new parents, and families alike.

She traces the throughline back to the pool. "I was really good at just one thing," she says of her swimming years — and it's a philosophy she now hands to the young people she mentors directly: "Be good at one thing. Then try a hundred others, and let yourself fail at most of them. That's fine."

The Bubble, and What You Make of It

Shireena is quick to point out that her AES years weren't subsidized by a company relocation package — her parents paid for the education themselves, a choice she now recognizes as a real sacrifice. She describes AES at the time as offering something rarer than it might seem today: permission to try anything, be anyone, before that kind of open-mindedness became standard educational language. "A lot of people find that mindset later in life," she says. "I got to try it out in my twenties."

Some of her closest friendships still trace straight back to the AES hallways — a small group of former classmates, Indian, Canadian, and English among them, who still keep up a group chat decades on. And the loop has closed in an unexpected way: her own children now attend Singapore American School, where she keeps noticing the same books on the shelves and, more than once, teachers who once taught at — or attended — AES themselves.

Looking back at what made the difference, Shireena doesn't point to a trophy or a transcript. She points to a coach who noticed a kid who needed somewhere to belong, and gave her one. It's the same thing she now tries to give to the young people she mentors and, in turn, to her own daughter, Lara.

Shireena sees the pattern repeating itself in her own house. Lara, 16, is a national-level equestrian in Singapore — and Shireena has made a point of being to her what Lisa File once was to a nervous swimmer in Delhi. "It's the same thing," she says. "Having someone in your corner who thinks you're capable before you believe it yourself." Three decades after a coach decided a shy new kid was worth fighting for, Shireena is still passing the favor along — one daughter, one client, one mentee at a time.