‘I gave up my career to attend to my family.’
‘With the kind of education I had, I couldn’t have got a job.’
‘I never had enough support.’
‘No opportunities came my way.’
Its excuses galore. But all that you need to grab an opportunity is the will to grab an opportunity. And then, there are opportunities galore.
Chandni wants to crack the civil services exams and become a collector. She is just sixteen years old and is the blue-eyed-girl of her mentors. So? Well, just that until four years back, she was one of those shabbily clad children who go around with a sack on their backs hopping from one garbage heap to another getting harassed by the police and sexually exploited by random passersby. And she was one of those unfortunate children who don’t just find a living in a dump yard but live also in dump yards, their colonies, with cluttered shanties in filthy surroundings, no better than dump yards per se.
Then a non-formal school came knocking at the door of her eminently forgettable shanty tucked away in the slums of Atta Market in Noida. She joined this school, ignoring alike her mother’s reluctance and her neighbours’ raised eyebrows.
I met her last year to interview her for my magazine, The Petticoat Journal. I still remember the glitter in her eyes when she told me that she was going to join a regular school soon. When I spoke to her again while writing this SHEROES column, she was in the middle of preparing for her Class 10 half yearly exams due later this month. I said, “Good luck.” She said, “Thank you very much.” A prompt reply in spot on English.
She is one among the handful of girls who joined the non-formal school overstepping the taboos and expectations of the society around them. And among these handful children, Chandni has gone a little further becoming the National Secretary of Badhte Kadam, a forum for street and working children.
Cut to Chandni’s posh neighbourhood. Mumbai-based Kavita Patil, 36, got married, had children, and 11 years after her marriage craved to have a career, money of her own. “But with just a bachelor’s degree, it was very difficult to get a good job,” Kavita said. She kept the search on anyway. “I always had the option of joining my husband’s flourishing business. But that was not the point. I wanted to be completely independent, to do something on my own, one hundred percent,” she said while speaking to me for this column.
Then, four years back, while at an auditioning of her two-year-old daughter, the man behind the lens suggested that she try modeling. Serendipitous and going good. Four years later now, Kavita has appeared in about 170 TV commercials including Hitachi, Aashirwad atta, Hawkins, Honda etc along with Madhuri Dixit, Shah Rukh Khan, Boman Irani, Bipasha Basu, and directors like Anurag Basu, Anurag Kashyap, Rensil D’silva, Pradeep Sarkar.
“This job profile gives me ample time with my children and family. I don’t have to fight to strike a work-life balance,” she says. And of course, anything said about her financial independence would be an understatement.
In another set up, 43 year old Ekta Awachar, had to fight a long battle before she could start a career or the studies for it. “My husband just didn’t allow me to work or study. He was aggressive and would even turn violent. I chugged along thinking family matters more. But I kept on insisting about having a career every now and then. Then six years back, I just got the courage somehow,” Ekta said.
She enrolled for a course in law. “I filled the forms for the course with my one-year-old baby in one hand,” she says with a broad smile. However, things never got smooth back home. In the middle of her course, her husband informed her that he was in love with another woman. It meddled with her concentration and she had to take a break for a year. So it took her six years to finish a five-year law course. She is now waiting for her certificate and preparing to start practice at the Bombay High Court. “Also, right now I am busy with my own divorce case (which her husband filed recently),” Ekta says speaking to me for this column, “there was a time I wanted to end my life. Now I want more of life…forever.”
This confident signoff will leave you with a churn in your tummies… which will stoke a fire. Fire in the belly, they call it.
Pictures Courtesy - The Petticoat Journal