On March 11, the Madras Management Association organised its annual Women Managers’ Convention, with this year’s theme being ‘The Millennial Woman’. The convention saw women from all walks of life come together to exchange notes and share stories — of success, of failure, of supporting other women at the workplace and elsewhere, and words of encouragement to keep on persisting.
The first session, Leaning (Back) In , was chaired by Saundarya Rajesh, founder-President of the AVTAR Group, which works to help women get back into the workforce. The panelists were Hemalatha Annamalai, founder and CEO, Ampere Vehicle Pvt. Ltd., and Squadron Leader (retired) Toolika Rani, whose passion for mountaineering pushed her to scale the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest.
Missing one’s identity
Talking about women in the workplace, particularly those who want to get back to work after a short hiatus, Saundarya Rajesh said: “When I quit my job 20 years ago, not only did I become a statistic — that 48 per cent women under the age of 30 take a break at least once; 16 per cent of all employable women in India are at the workplace and that only 24.5 per cent of all women are economically engaged or employed in the country — I also missed having an identity of my own.
“In my career, I was just me, not someone’s mother, somebody’s wife or someone’s daughter. I was my own person. And that’s the worst kinds of missing — missing the kind of person you used to be. So, I wanted to work again and that led to another statistic: at any point, in India, there are 1.5 million employable women who have taken breaks and are looking to re-enter the work force.”
Saundarya went on to describe the work she does at AVTAR, the company she founded to empower women in the workplace and also the ones looking to re-enter the workforce. She said: “The work we do has impacted close to two-and-a-half lakh women in the workplace and close to 40,000 women have re-entered the workplace, and have contributed ₹250 crore to the exchequer.”
Scaling many basecamps
Speaking about how she finds the time to pursue her passion as well as excel at work, Sqn. Ldr. Toolika Rani said that she would train before and after work everyday. “While training, which was often me running laps around the training ground, I would set short goals and regard them as base camps. So after, say, 20 laps, it would be the first basecamp, and so on. So when I attempted to scale a peak, not just Everest, in my mind, I had already scaled the peak several times because of the nature of my training. It’s all in the mind, at the end of the day. If you want to do something, you will. It will automatically become a priority for you.”
Adding to the discourse on choosing to be her own boss, Hemalatha Annamalai advised women to not take too many people’s opinions into consideration before taking the plunge. “That said, you have to do your research thoroughly before taking the plunge. Make sure you know what you’re walking into,” she said.
The second session of the day, From Woman to Woman , was chaired by Dr Deborah Thiagarajan, Director of Dakshinachitra museum and chairperson of the Madras Craft Foundation. The other panellists were Deepti Bopaiah, executive director, GoSports Foundation; Manasi Sapre, Senior Director – Head of Programming and Acquisitions India, Vuclip Inc.; and Shreya Gadepalli, South Asia Director, Institute of Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP).
All the panellists agreed that women have to support other women in their lives, and that, more often than not, behind every successful woman, there is another who dared to dream big and dared to be different.
Manasi recalled an incident when a new mother on her team sought permission to temporarily turn an unused edit room into a place where she could pump breast milk. “I asked her where the other women had been doing this until now. I was horrified to learn that they were using the restroom!” Manasi narrated. “Not only was that completely unhygienic, it was also unfair! There should be rooms for this. Workplace culture needs to change to make it more, for the lack of a better term, woman-friendly. And this can be achieved only when women support each other,” she concluded.
Creativity, a way of life
After lunch — in a session titled A balancing act — artist, designer, educator and Silambam practitioner Aishwarya Manivannan addressed the audience on the importance of nurturing creativity in students. Creativity is not restricted to arts students; it is necessary for every field, she said. “It’s not a skill; it’s a way of life. Everyone is creative. They just have different ways of exploring and experiencing it.”
Criticising the education system in India, she explained that it creates followers and not leaders. “A teacher asks students to draw an apple and, when they don’t draw it a certain way, they are told they are wrong. The Indian education system doesn’t encourage children to think differently; they are expected to learn what textbooks say.” This, according to Aishwarya, doesn’t create lateral thinkers.
To prove her point, she showed the audience two drawings. The exercise was to create something out of a given shape (a triangle, in this case) in 10 seconds. The first picture was by a five-year-old; as expected, he drew a house from the triangle. The second picture was also that of a house but it was by a 76-year-old! “On one hand, we can look at it as our ability to retain the child in us. On the other, it shows that we haven’t grown in over 70 years, which is scary.”
This is where the need for balance comes in: most people predominantly use one side of their brain. While the left half is more logical and scientific, the right side drives creativity and emotions. According to Aishwarya, we need to find a balance between the two halves so that there is a creative outflow in every aspect of our lives.
Silambam, the 3,000-year-old martial art form of Tamil Nadu, helped Aishwarya strengthen this balance, which is why it goes hand-in-hand with her life as an artist, designer and educator. As a performer, she uses Silambam to break gender and societal binaries. With Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a base, she compared Silambam to self-actualisation, and spoke of the positive effects it has had on her life.
To conclude the session, and to the delight of the audience, she demonstrated various Silambam techniques.