'Pink' actress joins campaign for women empowerment

Actress Andrea Tariang, who featured in a key role in "Pink" -- a movie about women's rights -- has continued her crusade for women empowerment off-screen by joining a campaign 'Ab Samjhauta Nahin'.

The campaign, by ITC's brand for personal care Vivel, is aimed at inspiring women to break free from the shackles of age-old societal mindsets, as "freedom does not come with compromises".

At the recently concluded Kolkata Literary Meet, Andrea, along with some noted women authors, journalists, and singer Vidya Shah, got together for a special recitation of a tweaker version of Rabindranath Tagore's poem "Where The Mind Is Without Fear".

Others who are part of the initiative are authors Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Volga, Vaidehi, Paramita Sathpathy, and Priyanka Mukherjee, activist Ruchira Gupta and journalists Rana Ayyub and Sagarika Ghose.

They recited the poem, asking daughters to awaken to a world where they need to put a stop to compromising and to "uncondition" themselves and their inner spirit, read a statement.

For the campaign, the last line of the poem has been tweaked: "Into that heaven of freedom, Daughter, (daughter instead of my Father), let my country awake".

--IANS

rb/vt