What women want ...

Our annual summer holidays were almost always spent at grandmas' villages.  (My mother would argue that Sengottai, unlike Pattamadai, was no village but a modern town with piped water and electricity even back when she was a kid.)

During one such vacation, I watched with a mix of fascination and sadness my father's cousin sister pleading with her father that she be allowed to continue with her college education.  She had completed the undergraduate program in economics, which itself was a notable achievement for those days, and wanted to work on the master's degree.

A more recent Pattamadai--in 2005

She was one strong-willed woman, but her life was severely circumscribed by the role that men had in society.  Thus, when her father flatly negated her plan for higher studies, well, that was the end.  I remember getting teary-eyed myself when she was crying--hey, I was a kid!

As a male, I will never truly understand what women went through, and what women go through even now.  I merely have a feel for some of the issues they have to grapple with.  Issues that typically might not even blip in my male life.

Conditions have changed a lot for women over the decades since that summer when my aunt was devastated that she had to terminate her college plans.  Many of my own classmates, for instance, went on to become doctors and scientists and managers.  The generations that followed have had more and more choices to choose from.

The array of choices does not mean that life for women has gotten any better.  Given the biological aspect that only the female can reproduce, well, it is all the more a struggle to figure out what it is to be a female. It seems very easy for them to get damned if they did and to be damned if they didn't.  It is one tough life, I would imagine, to be a woman in this contemporary settings.  Perhaps in a strange way even tougher now than it was a few generations ago?

Take the case of Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.  Ever since she went on her book tour promoting Lean In and her version of feminism, it has been one heck of a controversy.  Of course, that itself is happening while we were still trying to understand whether women can really have it all, or should they simply admit that there are some serious tradeoff decisions to make.  Even a question of whether or not a young woman should decide in favor of an MBA is far more complicated than how that same question would be for a typical male.

All these facets--India's villages, women, MBA, corporate executives--interestingly came together in a story in the Wall Street Journal about "Chhavi Rajawat, the current sarpanch of Soda village in Rajasthan, who left a corporate job to help her ancestral village develop."

"Lean in" of a completely different kind.

WSJ: If you’d had a family and children to look after, would you still have been able to take up this job?Ms. Rajawat: I have been able to do it because I have my family’s support. I am single, but there have been so many women who have been able to do things despite having families to look after. If there is family support, it is easy to do a lot of things.
WSJ: As a woman leader, what message would you give to young girls and other working women?Ms. Rajawat: I think each one of us is a leader in our own capacity. We just need to realize that. As women, we have tremendous inner strength which enables us to take on multiple roles and do well even as we stretch beyond our comfort zones.

A long, long way have we come since that summer when my aunt sat crying.  Here is to hoping that it is a much shorter distance ahead.