O P I N I O N S

Fifty Fifty
A working mom must also be a good juggler
Kishwar Desai
After Sheryl Sandberg’s honest confession about how difficult it is to juggle professional and domestic duties, we have our very own Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, reiterating her woes about bringing up children while being a full-time high-profile executive. It is accounts like this, which essentially say that ‘women can’t have it all’ that make me wonder if the world hasn’t moved forward, at all, in the past few decades?

good news
Imparting market skills to make women self-reliant
ENACTUS, an initiative of UICET students, Chandigarh, 
is helping HIV positive women, and also those trained 
in phulkari.
By Aarti Kapur
Sometimes when all hope is lost, it is revived with a little push and a success story is born. With the efforts of an NGO group ENACTUS of Dr SSB University Institute of Chemical Engineering and Technology (UICET), Chandigarh, a unit making cloth bags run by HIV positive self-help women group is running in profit. The unit, which was shut down and declared sick by the authorities, has been receiving about 120 kg cloth bag order every month after ENACTUS comprising 67 members, including 45 students, worked with the team running the unit. The group was constituted in January 2011.

ground zero
Mr PM, how about a manned space mission?
Raj Chengappa
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a way with words even when he speaks in English. Last week, he punctured criticism against India’s Mars Mission by making a comparison that caught the imagination of the public.

Fifty Fifty
A working mom must also be a good juggler
Kishwar Desai

After Sheryl Sandberg’s honest confession about how difficult it is to juggle professional and domestic duties, we have our very own Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, reiterating her woes about bringing up children while being a full-time high-profile executive.

It is accounts like this, which essentially say that ‘women can’t have it all’ that make me wonder if the world hasn’t moved forward, at all, in the past few decades? These were the very same debates that used to worry us when we were young. Getting married was always an enormous tussle if you wanted to work, because who was going to look after the kids? And even now, things haven’t changed much ...except that technology has ensured working women can keep an eye on, or connect with, their children no matter where they are.

Nothing can replace a mother’s love.

Thus Ms Nooyi recollected recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado that she had actually begun to outsource parenting to family members and even her assistants in the office. Curiously, the latter is something in all my years as a working woman I had not tried. Of course we relied on parents and close friends to pitch in, but frankly I never thought I could ask my office receptionist to ‘help’ with my children and give them permission to play computer games! That is certainly something I never would have dreamt of doing...but perhaps that is why Ms Nooyi is way ahead of all of us.

The solution she has suggested is so peculiar that I would really like to know from all of you whether I am the only one who thinks it strange! She says that she had restricted her daughters from playing too many computer games. And the children knew they had to take permission from her. So they would call her office, and in case she was travelling, she would leave instructions with the receptionist to ask her daughter a set of questions. After the questions had been asked, the receptionist would give the child permission to play the game, perhaps for around half hour. And then this information would be communicated to Nooyi, no matter where she was.

It all sounds fascinating, but I am not sure if this is absolutely the best way? One might wonder if ‘outsourcing’ of parental authority means actually replacing yourself with a ‘receptionist’. And did the children get fooled into thinking it was mother Nooyi at the other end of the phone line and so obeyed her orders? Forget the Nooyi kids, I am totally confused with this example!

To be fair, in most middle-class families we do ‘outsource’ bringing up babies to maids and other domestic staff in the absence of family or friends, especially if one is working. This, too, can be considered a far-from-perfect solution, as usually this staff could be, even if very kind and loving, totally uneducated. But at least, the child gets the continuity of care in one’s own home without mixing up the ‘real’ mommy and the other caregivers.

Yet coming from a successful executive, Ms Nooyi’s example makes me wonder if working mothers in future will require support staff in the office who can take over long-distance maternal roles, if one is travelling or unavailable.

However, even if this solution works — no matter how many primary, secondary, tertiary caregivers a working mom conjures up — nothing, it seems, takes away the burden of guilt, and that is what Ms Nooyi seems to indicate. Not even a salary of over $14 million can make it vanish.

Her main point is that women’s ambitions are felled by their biological clock, which inevitably, need attention at a time just when their careers are taking off. And then, let’s not forget the spouse! It is the other half who also suffers his share of neglect as well. Some husbands might help out and forget their ego, revelling in the wife’s success, while others might decide that this is an uncomfortable situation.

Ms Nooyi’s long-suffering husband has apparently conceded that he comes at the bottom of the list of her priorities and is now reconciled to it. But she is concerned that her daughters might be less charitable. After all, they might feel hurt that they were not at the top of her mind, constantly.

I can, as someone who has been a working mother, empathise with her. But at the same time I would add that it is important for all of us to encourage women of all ages to follow their dream. But the lesson to be learnt from Indra Nooyi’s experience is not that women cannot have a fulfilling life both at home and at the office, but that they have to remain determined and not give in and find innovative solutions — as Ms Nooyi did.

good news
Imparting market skills to make women self-reliant
ENACTUS, an initiative of UICET students, Chandigarh, is helping HIV positive women, and also those trained in phulkari.
By Aarti Kapur

ENACTUS members at the cloth bag unit being run by HIV positive women in Sector 15, Chandigarh. Tribune photo: Manoj Mahajan

Sometimes when all hope is lost, it is revived with a little push and a success story is born. With the efforts of an NGO group ENACTUS of Dr SSB University Institute of Chemical Engineering and Technology (UICET), Chandigarh, a unit making cloth bags run by HIV positive self-help women group is running in profit.

The unit, which was shut down and declared sick by the authorities, has been receiving about 120 kg cloth bag order every month after ENACTUS comprising 67 members, including 45 students, worked with the team running the unit. The group was constituted in January 2011.

Over the past three years, ENACTUS members and mentors have worked on seven projects to train labourers and get their products marketed. The group secretary, Gaurav Gupta, says last year they undertook ASTITVA project after they found that due to lack of marketing, orders were not being received by the unit. Various teams were formed to approach shop owners to get orders for cloth bags, thereby giving a boost to the sick unit.

The group organised marketing drives in Sectors 8, 9, 17 and 22 of the city by going to customers and shopkeepers to convince them to buy products made by the self-help women group. Gaurav says at present seven HIV positive women are running this unit, which is regularly receiving orders from various shops.

From March to September last year, the unit remained closed as the NGO which runs the unit neither got any financial support from the government nor any commercial orders. A spokesperson for the NGO says they could not pay salary for five months to their staff deployed at the unit.

‘Phulkari’ art

Another project which ENACTUS is running helps women trained in “phulkari”. A group of 50 women from Ambala were adopted by ENACTUS. They knew “phulkari” but were not getting commercial orders. The students trained them to market their products and made their units financially sustainable.

Another group of 15 women from Patiala who were being exploited by middlemen and paid meagre amounts for their exquisite products were encouraged to revive the ancient art of “phulkari”.

The group is doing more. About 30 sex workers and unskilled girls were trained in marketing skills and now they are earning their own livelihood by making “phulkari” products at their places. ENACTUS imparted them three-month professional training, helping them get respectable jobs.

ENACTUS president Saurab Mittal says they are training people from the economically weaker section and guiding them to market their products. The group also trained two mentally challenged persons from Ambala in block printing.

He says when ENACTUS came in contact with women from Patiala, it learnt that they were producing beautiful “phulkari” patterns but they were being paid Rs 100 for a single product which took almost a month to finish. The pieces, however, were being sold for over Rs 2,000 each in the urban market. ENACTUS linked them with local markets so they could sell the products at suitable rates and make profit.

One for society

The coordinator of ENACTUS, Seema Kapoor, says recently a Tokyo-based company gave a grant of Rs 2 lakh to the group as financial assistance. Students have been contributing in various projects for the last three years.

She says the group identifies people who are skilled but fail to market their products. Through this organisation, students learn about their social responsibility and contribute to the growth of society.

Under the Krishi project, 20 farmers were assisted to produce and market organic products.

Avaral, a first-year student and member of the group, says students are taking interest in social work as it is a good career opportunity in big companies. A majority of big brand companies are setting up special cells to assist weaker sections financially and formulate strategy to make them self-reliant.