In a land where male chauvinism still runs rampant in the work sphere in many places and atrocities against women are a regular phenomenon, it is heartening to see the giant strides made by certain women in the corridors of power.
30 Women in Power: Their Voices, Their Stories, edited by Naina Lal Kidwai, brings together 30 extraordinary achievers and gets them to talk about their journey and their achievements. The women featured here talk chiefly about their role models, inspirations, guiding principles, the juggle to maintain the personal-professional balance, gender biases and the myth/existence of the infamous glass ceiling and ways to shatter it.
What strikes the reader immediately is that the voices are unanimously strong and vocal even when talking about failures, compromises and inadequacies. An introductory piece by Naina Lal Kidwai sets the tone by highlighting the special features that link all the 30 women of substance and presents it to the reader as a concise advisory essay. Each achiever is allotted a chapter and thus, businesswoman Aruna Jayanthi stresses on the need to build strong teams while banker extraordinaire Arundhati Bhattacharya confesses to having ventured into banking by “chance and circumstance”. She declares placing high value on getting one’s priorities right and learning the art of saying “no”.
The other well-known banker Chanda Kochhar firmly declares that all selections and promotions in the work sphere should be merit based and warns about the risk of getting insulated while climbing the career ladder. Keeping communication channels open with colleagues is another thing she strongly believes in and financial advisor Bharti Gupta Ramola staunchly seconds this. Dr Jyotsna Suri traces her progress from mother and homemaker to a competent hotelier who made her line of hotels a successful catalyst for cultural rejuvenation. She considers a woman’s ability to multitask her greatest asset, a trait that comes handy at the workplace.
Majority of the women agree that they would not have made it without the valuable contribution of family, relatives, friends, nannies and other domestic workers, the choosing of a spouse unanimously considered pivotal to success. The untimely demise of a father/husband is a recurrent occurrence that propelled many a woman to grab business reins. The fellow feeling and pride in each other’s successes is palpable, there is no room for jealousy in this sisterhood of achievers.
Sunita Narain, Nirupama Rao, Preetha Reddy, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and all others end each of their chapters with nuggets of priceless advice. Countless women readers (many a male reader, too!) are likely to benefit from these. The same set of questions asked of every woman results in a lot of the answers overlapping, regrettably. Different angles and areas of perception of women’s success in the boardroom might have lent this book an added dimension. Some readers may have preferred fewer women featured on in the list and each one writing a more prolific piece, but given the diversity of professions covered—banking, journalism, law, hospitality, social service and others—this would have been an impossible task. Though short the chapters are loaded with personal and professional information besides being deeply enlightening; each woman in tracing her journey from rookie professional to celebrity status lays bare her life with unusual frankness. A deeply inspiring and valuable read, this book might well become the Bible for future professionals, irrespective of gender.