HYDERABAD: One of the opening pages reads: This book is for every girl who wants to change the world, but is told that the world is too big. Remember, yo you are the world. With just that line, Ria Sharma’s Make Love Not Scars starts off on a high note and manages to sustain the enthusiasm to create a new world in its own style. The book is about a Delhi brat studying fashion design at Leeds College of Art suddenly finds herself doing a project on women empowerment, talking to acid attack survivors and even witnessing a surgery. How each of her interactions with the survivors leads her close to setting up her NGO Make Love Not Scars and trying to make a difference to them is the crux of the book. That the author and the publisher consciously use the word survivors instead of victims is commendable.
The book has 22 chapters and in neat installments gives us a glimpse of a privileged girl who takes a break from her material life to see what she can do as an individual to her cause. The first few chapters are about her own dysfunctional family and how she adapts herself to the changing dynamics of her life. The book then explores the way she manages to get Reshma to walk the ramp for New Yorks Fashion Walk. Chapter 16 gives the reader a close brush with the tragedy that the survivors face. (no eyelids to blink, she writes).
Her encounter with a doctor who humiliates her for carrying a Micheal Kors and judges her based on what she wears paints a real picture of doctor’s interactions with the survivors. One of the last few chapters throws light on how everyone from media to brands and bloggers take the social activist’s time, but are never ready to pay her back for her story or her time. The book is a good read for those who want to pursue a cause and what to expect when you go after a cause that you believe in. Lucid and sensitive, it makes you sit up and think about whole lot of issues troubling the world currently.
Westland, `499. 201 pages
— Manju Latha Kalanidhi
kalanidhi@newindianexpress.com
@mkalanidhi