This Women’s Day is a special one – the first, since I decided to dedicate my career to build for India’s gender and livelihood crisis. Kalaa – a growing sisterhood of +950 women based in 3 states in North India, gives me my ‘raison d’etre’ and teaches me lessons on compassion, life and love every day.
The crisis we’re tackling? 52% women in India today are not in any education, training or employment. India ranks 135/146 countries in female labour force participation.
This women’s day, I want us to ask ourselves – are women lacking jobs or is the workforce lacking women?
The discussion on women in the workforce has often been around ‘reserving space’ or ‘giving opportunities’; of treating women as ‘beneficiaries’ in a male dominated world. This narrative ensures that the power remains out of our hands, and with the system.
We are not beneficiaries, we are powerful creators and we can teach you a way to rethink our systems. We imagine a world that is driven by feminist qualities – of compassion and empathy, strength and resilience, intelligence and creativity.
Look around, you witness the magic of feminist qualities every day, but would rarely notice it. For me, the shift first happened when I spent time with frontline ASHA workers on a boat clinic in Assam. The purity of their work and the care with which they perform their duties was unlike anything I’d witnessed before. I noticed this in female public health administrators – who spoke about patients as people and not cases. I noticed this in my mum (and Co-Founder), who was spending her days nurturing the first Kalaa Sakhi community in an urban slum in Okhla. I felt it in the products that Kalaa Sakhis created – that were made with love, while singing, dancing and in harmony with family care duties. These women made the communities and spaces around them worth living in – they were creating magic, and I wanted in.
So, I ask you – can we stop trying to squeeze women into our diversity and inclusion policy, for PR and for optics? Can we instead entirely rethink our systems where every company holds feminist qualities at the core of their culture? Can we train our leaders – male or female – to be compassionate, so the burden of retaining these feminist qualities in a fast-paced environment is equally distributed?
At Kalaa, I learn lessons on compassion from the Kalaa Sakhi sisterhood and I try to imbibe these in my leadership style. They teach me to create, to work while singing and to build an environment where care duties are not compromised at the cost of financial independence. They teach me to dream of a tomorrow where these care duties are valued in the workforce – to ensure that we as a community retain the strongest feminist qualities, of compassion and creation.
Kalaa Sakhi 