Miss England 2019, Bhasha Mukherjee is putting the title on hold for the period until the coronavirus pandemic is over.
The 24-year-old before competing in the Miss World pageant in December 2019, won Miss England.
She took a career break as a junior doctor specializing in respiratory medicine to focus on several charity works she embarked on as a beauty queen.
“I was invited to Africa, to Turkey, then to India, Pakistan and several other Asian countries to be an ambassador for various charity work,” she told CNN.
She had been in India at the beginning of March on behalf of Coventry Mercia Lions Club, a development and community charity for which she was ambassador; visited schools with donations of stationery, and also gave money to a home for abandoned girls.
Mukherjee was getting messages from former colleagues at her old hospital, the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, eastern England, telling her how bad the pandemic was affecting them.
Mukherjee contacted the hospital’s management team to let them know that she wanted to return to work.
Speaking to CNN she noted that it felt wrong to be wearing her Miss England crown, even for humanitarian work, while people around the world were dying from coronavirus and her colleagues were working so hard.
“When you are doing all this humanitarian work abroad, you’re still expected to put the crown on, get ready… look pretty.”
But, she added: “I wanted to come back home. I wanted to come and go straight to work.”
Mukherjee, who moved to the English city of Derby from Kolkata at the age of 9, said: “I felt a sense of this is what I’d got this degree for and what better time to be part of this particular sector than now.”
