Girls, uninterrupted

Wonder Girls
Success Stories Of Millennials Who Fought To Do It Their Way
Varsha Adusumilli
Juggernaut
256 pages, Rs 299

Spanglish, a 2004 American rom-com, opens with the gentle voice of the protagonist declaring: “Most influential person: My mother. No contest.” The statement is part of the application essay she is writing to the dean of Princeton University.

As the opening scene of Spanglish shows, inspiration can flow from the most commonplace of sources. It highlights the central point of Varsha Adusumilli’s book, that there are many role models who remain unknown and unsung, and that is the starting premise of her book Wonder Girls: Success Stories of Millennials Who Fought To Do It Their Way.

The idea for Ms Adusumilli’s book developed after she befriended some local girls at a friend’s wedding. These young girls bombarded her with questions about her life — she is an alumnus of BITS Pilani and one of the founding members of digital media start-up YourStory — and she soon identified a pattern to their queries. The experience, she said, intrigued her and got her thinking. Those thoughts finally took shape in this book.

These, then, are tales of triumph of an artiste, a rock climber, a scientist, an academic and a doctor, who pushed past numerous hurdles to reach their goals — and all this away from the spotlight.

Their untold stories, Ms Adusumilli claims, can inspire millions of girls. They may well have, had Ms Adusumilli been a more inspiring and less prosaic writer.

The first piece is about national rugby team captain Neha Pardeshi. To magnify the rarity of Ms Pardeshi’s achievement, Ms Adusumilli offers statistics highlighting the insignificant participation of Indian girls in similar activities. This doesn’t mean much in this context, because rugby is scarcely a mainstream sport for any gender in India anyway. Still, the story of a small-built woman choosing a relatively obscure contact sport such as rugby and going on to become the captain of the national team is worth reading about, especially because her struggles — the physical pain and the psychological pressures — only made her more resolute about her career choice.

The writer chooses her next protagonist from among 100-odd neurosurgeons in the country, Vasundhara Rangan. She was fulfilling her father’s dying wish, the writer tells us. Her life was tough, her path strewn with social and financial constraints, but her determination was rock-hard. Only her mother’s sacrifices in bringing up two children single-handedly made things a little conducive for her.

In India, women photojournalists are no longer a rare species, so to speak. But Ms Adusumilli seems to think they are and selects Shravya Kag to showcase, offering an alternative and courageous option for those who think pursing academics is the only path to the good life.

Fitness coach Nilparna Sen, artist Shilo Shiv Suleman, physics professor at Indian Institute of Science Prerna Sharma, flight commander Rucha Nirale, brand marketer Ruth Sequeira, scientist Nishma Dahal, casting director Shoumie Mukherjee, actress Shweta Tripathi, radio jockey Sucharita Tyagi, rock climber Gowri Varanashi, classical dancer Priyanka Chandrasekhar and visual artist Rhea Gupta — all have won hard-fought battles to get where they are.

Even if the drab and unimaginative narrative style of these standalone accounts were ignored, the lack of a unifying framework weakens the book. The only common thread running through these stories is that these women have overcome huge hurdles to follow their dreams. Which career woman in India doesn’t face similar challenges?

Also, why have these women been chosen and not others? Some of the career choices are unconventional, of course — rugby players, rock climber. But women now proliferate as fitness coaches, airlines pilots, radio jockeys, in marketing, and film making.

The book may have worked had the author opted to portray the stories of women who chose unusual professions. Without any unifying theme, the book amounts to random stories about random women achievers.

Ms Adusumilli’s purpose is undoubtedly noble, but the treatment of the subject is lowbrow. She has tried to present her characters as voices of conscience. The idea is to make readers (principally women, we assume) identify with the struggles of her subjects. But her view of women and work is at once naïve and elitist. She has fished out well-worn data — only 27 per cent of working-age women have jobs in India — from the International Labour Organization (ILO) reports to underline the lack of inspiration as one of the main reasons for the poor representation of women in the workforce.

If that is what she believes, she urgently needs a crash course in gender equity in India.