SHE WALKS, SHE LEADS
Women Who Inspire India
Gunjan Jain
Penguin Viking
556 pages; Rs 799
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Hype, sadly, is hard to live up to, and this book bears testimony to that. Part of the problem lies in the selection of subjects. The first few women profiled include Nita Ambani, Parmeshwar Godrej and Rajashree Birla, whose life trajectories owe as much to their marriages into prominent industrialist families as they do their individual personalities. Moreover, Ms Jain focuses ad nauseum on the fact that they’re great mothers or supportive wives or warm hostesses — thereby furthering a dangerous stereotype of women who are not just successful because they have married into privilege, but to whom professional success has been incidental. And consequently, the book seems to cast these exceptional women into the very moulds that women the world over are trying to break out of.
The women selected in She Walks, She Leads are organised into six categories — altruism & other interests; corporate, banking and law; entertainment; fashion, the arts and empowerment; media and sport. Including author Sudha Murthy, CEO Indra Nooyi, lawyer Zia Mody, actress Priyanka Chopra, media baron Shobhana Bhartia and boxer Mary Kom, amongst others, the profiles are accompanied by reference conversations with a person who has borne witness to the protagonists’ lives.
In this hodgepodge of stories, some stand out. Sudha Murty’s life savings became the seed capital for husband Narayana Murthy’s company Infosys. Swati Piramal, a doctor with a social conscience, transformed the bankrupt and splintered family textile business into a pharma, real estate and financial services giant. Corporate honcho Indra Nooyi discovered that she could connect better with her American colleagues after she developed an interest in baseball. Sania Mirza cocked a snook at not only her opponents on court, but also the media, which was quick to write her off after she married Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik, to reach the pinnacle of the tennis doubles circuit. Mira Nair introduced Indian culture in all its complex colours to global audiences, and started one of India’s best known NGOs for street children.
Some battles stand out for being particularly heroic, like Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw’s decision to become an entrepreneur in the biotech sector after being rejected for positions as a brewer — the job for which she had trained. Mary Kom took some hard knocks too, in her quest to become a world class boxer. She represented India in the Asian Woman’s Cup in China, leaving her family to tend to her son who needed surgery.
The trait common to all the women in the book is that they all have strong will power, foresight and acumen to achieve their dreams. Noted surgeon Devi Shetty describes Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw as a wise ice hockey player who almost always knows where the puck will go next. Every one of the women in She Walks, She Leads demonstrates a high level of soft skills. Unlike their male counterparts, these women seem to have embraced their personal lives more organically. All of them also display a strong passion for philanthropy, whether it is Arnavaz Aga, who enabled her company Thermax’s NGO partner Akanksha to start the successful Teach For India campaign; Yasmeen Premji who successfully manages the Azim Premji Philanthropic Foundation or Ms Mazumdar-Shaw, who has pledged to give away 75 per cent of her fortune when she dies.
Why, then, if these stories are so compelling, does She Walks, She Leads fail to make an impact? First, the book offers scant advice to young women professionals, perhaps because it has failed to ask what success means to the women in question, and how they have achieved it. One suspects that the author’s choice of questions has something to do with this, as she focuses on issues of work-life balance, child-rearing and housekeeping in every profile — instead of asking exactly how they charted their professional lives.
Second, the author seems rather partial to jarring platitudes. For example, writing about a corporate power couple, she says, “they embody everything wonderful and sacred about marriage.”
Third, there is a noticeable lack of women achievers who have not conformed to traditional societal expectations of marriage and motherhood to carve out career paths. A few, like lawyer Zia Mody, confess to having no work-life balance, keeping all sorts of hours at work. But most of the others seem to lead frenetic lives, juggling business and the kitchen with superhuman ease. The anthology would have been that much richer had these stories been balanced with accounts of more unconventional, non-conformist paths to success.
All in all, She Walks, She Leads is an uninspired tome, enlivened only in part by some of the exceptional women who inhabit its pages.
