AIDS memoir

A Stranger Truth: Lessons in Love, Leadership and Courage from India's Sex Workers
Ashok Alexander
Juggernaut, 287 pages; Rs 699
 
In early 2000s, HIV/AIDS researchers across the world were predicting that India would soon be in the grips of the worst epidemic of the disease in the world. The fact that it didn’t happen is one of the biggest success stories in the field of public health. Avahan, the focused AIDS prevention initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was at the forefront of this mammoth public health battle. Decades later, the memoir A Stranger Truth gives readers backstage insights into how this happened. Written by Ashok Alexander, who steered Avahan’s work through those tumultuous early years when HIV/AIDS prevention methodologies and best practices hadn’t even been established, the memoir offers not only a rare inside glimpse of the key players involved but also the thinking behind the development of a preventive model that has now been recognised the world over.

 

Mr Alexander was an unlikely choice to head the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in India. The memoir begins with an engaging account of his move from corporate life at McKinsey’s to a bewildering, looking-glass world of sex workers, injecting-drug users and HIV positive people in India. Early on, he realised that replicating HIV prevention models implemented in Thailand wouldn’t work in India. Unlike in other countries where sex work was localised in brothels, in India sex was bought and sold in alleys, parks and bus stops. The very diffuse nature of sex work in India made the distribution of condoms, monitoring of the health of sex workers and regulating sex work in general a difficult task. Mr Alexander writes about his early days, using life-size mannequins to learn exactly how the female condom is used, sidestepping people having sex in parks on his early field visits, and more. Understandably, all this was a bit of a shock to someone who’d worn a suit to work every day till then.

 
The first section of the memoir deals with these early learnings from the field. As Mr Alexander travelled across the country meeting sex workers, transgender people and truckers, he began to catch glimpses of rare beauty and powerful lessons in leadership and courage. Sex workers, he realised, weren’t all victims. Many members of the sex trade displayed, he writes, some of the best traits of leaders — the capacity to judge character, negotiate well, personal courage, charisma and sense of humour. Consequently, he tailored Avahan’s work not only bearing in mind their needs – but by enabling them to become the primary agents of change themselves. This community-based approach has, in fact, been cited as the reason Avahan’s programmes have succeeded where others have not. As he details his field experiences in which some of the richest and most powerful people in the world crossed paths with some of the poorest and most desperate, Mr Alexander gained valuable insights into the needs of communities most at risk of getting infected by the HIV virus — female sex workers, MSMs (men who have sex with men), transgender people, injecting-drug users and truckers. The memoir becomes, thus, a richly detailed and sensitive ethnography of sex work in India.

 
What sets A Stranger Truth apart from other such field reports and ethnographies is the respect the author has for sex workers. In spite of heading the country’s largest funding agency for HIV/AIDS prevention, Mr Alexander refuses to patronise. The more he learnt about the world of the female sex worker, the more he admired her will to survive. She deals with emotional, health and financial crisis all the time — that too without any support system. She has no power, is constantly under the threat of violence and yet she must be in control. Mr Alexander writes that there is much he has learned about life, leadership and values from the sex workers he has met. So much so that when years later he was invited by the McKinsey offices in Chicago to speak on Values Day, his speech was entitled Leadership Secrets of the Commercial Sex Worker. In spite of an initially squeamish response, Mr Alexander received a standing ovation.

 
The memoir offers many unique takeaways. For example, the reader learns that all sex workers aren’t equal. Some are destitute, but many, who service four to five clients a day, are able earn between Rs 500-800 a day. Some do it to ward off starvation. Others do it to save money for a new laptop or to pay their children’s fees. Some look like housewives, others school teachers. All are, however, vulnerable to daily assault, abuse and discrimination. From the perspective of HIV prevention, rather than removing brothels, Alexander believes that the solution lies in legalising and regulating them better. The most interesting takeaway from the book is that learnings from the corporate world can be very successfully applied to ensure the success of social development projects such as Avahan.

 
A Stranger Truth paints a portrait of contemporary India that remains hidden to most readers. This is what makes this memoir a must-read for activists, policy makers and students of Indian society. The book could have, however, benefitted from tighter editing. Some readers may feel that Mr Alexander tends to look at sex workers, the transgender community and injecting-drug users through rose-tinted lenses. But, inspiring, positive and thoroughly readable, the truth it tells is a strange truth indeed.