The Ugly Duckling December 16, 2005

Two women, both very successful professionals in their own rights; one works in the interiors of Madhya Pradesh as a doctor and the other leads an R&D team of software engineers in Bangalore. First the story of the doctor.Tripti Das was born as the middle child in a brood of three. She was the most non-descript of the three and early in life, her father decided that she was the “plain Jane’’ who would not make it big in life. She was just not good enough. When she failed to make it to the Air Force Medical College, he was proven right. That’s all. Tripti did not tell anyone anything but secretly, the whole of the next year, she saved on her bus fare and with that money, she wrote the test again. She cleared it, completed her medical education and eventually, joined the defence services. Having spent long years there, she went overseas where she set up her flourishing practice to finally return to India to serve the rural poor. She is in her early fifties today and still feels the emptiness left behind by a parent who declared early in life that she would not be able to make it.Maya Rao was born in a lower middle-class family, among six other siblings in a small town in Karnataka. Her father was a salaried man. In her ninth standard, when she decided to study mathematics he frowned. He also wanted that she should go to the women’s college nearby somehow get her graduate degree and just get married. Her refusal to go to the women’s college confirmed his thoughts that she was on her way to become a rebel. Maya persisted to complete her bachelor’s and then her master’s degree in mathematics. Her father, however, completely opposed the idea of her wanting to do a post-doctoral work at the Indian Institute of Technology and forced her to join a bank in Hyderabad. Maya went to join the bank and from there, within a week, put in her papers, sat on a train to Kharagpur and never came back. From there to a software R&D centre was a long walk she is able to recount with ease. But like Tripti, she wants to cry when she recalls the path she had to take to assert her right to dream. Like Tripti, Maya is clueless why her father always said ‘no’ to her, each time she wanted to do something.It is a country of a billion people almost half are women. It is commonly understood that the girl child in rural India is conditioned to a variety of ‘soft discrimination’. She begins to accept it all and when she grows up, sometimes she extends it to her daughter, as her time comes. As a result, her son gets the nutrition that he must have, the education he must be given and the better clothes, the toys, the medical attention and whatever else. Even in semi-urban, lower middle-class families, the boy-girl divide is complete. My mother’s mother in the Bengal of the 1920s told her that the girl child of the family must be content with eating the head and tail of the fish. The men were to be served the in-between pieces.But what with fathers of people like Tripti and Maya? It is a complex psycho-social issue and each story is unique in many ways. If we were to step into the father’s mind who knows what parental anxiety, what sense of protection or what warped thought led them to push a high-achiever girl into a position of emotional struggle? It wasn’t a struggle with the outside world. Not with the professor in her college. Not with the boss at work. With their own fathers!No, I am not a social activist or a reformer. All I want is to tell people that in countries like the US, the percentage of female white collar workers is almost the same as their male counterpart. In our country it is difficult to make an estimate. A little digging into the facts would tell us that while in the hi-tech sector in the best organisations, women constitute less than 20% of the workforce and the national average across all organisations is a lamentable 12%. Most workplaces try and ‘accommodate’ women, some treat them with plain ‘tolerance’.But Tripti and Maya are no ordinary people. They are shaping the futures of their respective organisations. Their path to professional stardom need not have been strewn with rejection. Somewhere that scar remains. To the parents of the many such darkcomplexioned, non-descript, middle-child born females here is a respectful request: “Please do not write her off yet.’’ Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html