Who let the women out?
My maternal grandmother — my dimmah — recounted to me tales of playing hide and seek amidst the paddy fields of her native village in what is modern day Bangladesh. She used to narrate tales of her girl-friends who got possessed because they left their hair open too late into the evening when washing clothes by the river. I also remember when she — most strangely — told me stories of the the Egyptian god Ra. I knew about him through books in my school library, how did she know about him?
You see, dimmah wasn’t your average neighborhood grandma. She had not only got herself a Masters in History, but also had the ability to recollect stories of the gods about whom she had written in her Masters thesis on Egyptian history more than 50 years ago. Even to my juvenile brain, stories of Osiris, of Siraj-ud-daulah, of Clive, of Rani Laxmibai, all combined couldn’t seem to match up to the one I had in front of me — my dimmah, who decided to say YOLO way back in the India of the 1940s.
Being the daughter of this incredible woman, my mother raised my brother and me with the firm belief that there was nothing a man could do that a woman couldn’t do equally well — if not better. She hadn’t got much opportunity to explore this much herself as she was married off after her college, so she instilled it in us instead. She narrated to us openly the tales of the controlling patriarchy in her life and how she took charge of the situations she ended up in, from learning (and mastering) to cook under her mother-in-law, to dealing with unruly relatives, to carrying two kids across the Arabian Sea multiple times just by herself. She made sure we knew her story. Most importantly, she raised us without an inkling of male entitlement — the Raja Beta syndrome; there was no household chore that was too “feminine” for us. We were expected to clean up after ourselves, from our plates after food, to our rooms after family parties. My long-held fascination with food naturally drew me to the kitchen, and I was allowed to cook on the gas since I was 14.
But then our mother wasn’t the only person who raised us. And unfortunately, society seeped its miserable ‘values’ and systems into us through other adults, radio, television and later the internet. So while I grew up respecting women and never questioned their equality to men, social conditioning led me to subconsciously think of them in all the stereotypical ways and this is perhaps best summarized by this highly cringe-worthy image that I shared on my Facebook back in 2010 just before starting university.
When I reached the shores of Singapore, I was lucky to befriend a lot of women who spoke their minds. It opened me up to the world of women, which I realized was nothing like the world I had imagined in my mind for them. One of them in particular, Vaish, turned out to be a life-changer for me. One of my earliest memories of her is when a handful of us were hanging out outside one of our hostel blocks, and when Vaish was tired, she announced it and sat on the ground. I — being cripplingly introverted and all that — couldn’t believe that somebody in front of me just sat on the ground in a very public place. Needless to say, this wasn’t her only act of don’t-give-a-shit-what-you-think, and over the years her loud defiance was one of the greatest nutcrackers of my introverted shell. We have turned nights to mornings in our discussions on society, religion, sexuality, quantum physics, the universe, and so much more. In a world where I was regularly (and inadvertently) punished by society for my introversion, this woman liberally (and inadvertently) freed my spirit. Vaish’s other achievements also includes saying “You hit him first, of course he can hit you back” to another (female) friend who was seriously trying to play the gender card after jokingly hitting me.
One of the things from my time in Singapore that I am most thankful about is that at NUS I learnt to think critically, which I attribute less to my education there and more to these amazing friends I had made. I learnt to unlearn so much of the bullshit I had been fed by the world. So obviously, when I decided to leave Singapore in January 2017 for good, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy living without these people. Whatever unlearning I underwent allowed me to discard the illusion of first-world glamour for a happier developing-world life, but I was intensely fearful of a life sans amazing friendship.
Moving to Bombay turned out to be less worrisome than I’d expected. On my very first day at Rolling Cube, Sonam — the Founder and CEO— met me in front of the office building for breakfast and I knew from our conversation that we were going to get along fabulously. I was proved right over the course of the past year of working together, as our various conversations ranged across the entire spectrum of possible topics of conversation, reminiscent to me of those with Vaish.
Added to good friendship is the fact that Sonam also happens to be a total badass. From her college days of building electric racecars for IIT Bombay at Formula Student to working on making sanitary pads at P&G, she has dealt with the manufacturing industry long enough to know how unfriendly towards women it is, and changing this was one of her visions behind founding Rolling Cube. Sonam, who is held in near demi-god reverence (as narrated to me by multiple sources) by her juniors from IITB for her work on those electric racecars, has many stories to tell of how dismissive vendors are in discussing manufacturing with her — a woman. Because, you know, how could a woman understand engineering and manufacturing? How could they expect her to get down and dirty with machines and parts? The industry is full of cranky old uncles who often find it hard to believe that a woman, so young nonetheless, knows so much about their work. Sonam obviously can’t care less, she washes their foggy brains with her ocean of knowledge and expertise, and gets the job done.
In writing this piece, I couldn’t write about all the women I know who have taken charge of their individual destinies, because writing that would take far longer than I have. Instead, I cherry-picked the most influential examples from my life (and I also had to exclude Lady Gaga because I wanted to keep this personal), and tried to make this piece an inspiring celebration of women in my life who, in spite of the way the world has been built against them, have either mastered the rules of the game, or happily discarded them, or are set on a journey to change the rules altogether. And in doing so, these women created value in my life that may have otherwise not existed, for which I am eternally grateful. Happy Women’s Day everyone!
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