On May 28, observed globally as Menstrual Hygiene Day, the city hosted the second edition of Period Party, a community gathering organised by FRIDA Health, a Delhi-based women's health advocacy lab. For founder Prakshi Saha, Period Party began as an initiative to replace solemn conversations about menstruation with joy and collective reflection.
Saha has spent nearly a decade working in the menstrual health sector, and the idea emerged from a growing frustration with how discussions around periods were being framed.
"I was feeling like there was something missing," she says. "A lot of the discourse in academia or civil society is about the crisis, the data and the numbers, which is important. But menstruation is so much more about our lived experiences than it is about a data point."
Having worked across product distribution, workshops, research collaborations and policy initiatives, she felt that conversations around menstrual health often remained confined to experts speaking to other experts. The challenge, she says, was finding a way to bring ordinary people into the conversation.
Thus emerged Period Party, a space designed around community and the creation of a safe environment where participants could speak openly about menstruation, sexuality and their relationships with their bodies without judgement.
"We wanted to bring joy back to the centre of conversations around women's bodies and get rid of shame," explains Saha. "The whole reason many of us began working on these issues was because there is so much stigma attached to our bodies."
Combining art, mental health, healthcare and storytelling, this year's edition brought together women from diverse backgrounds alongside healthcare professionals, mental health practitioners and content creators.
The event included sessions such as Flow State, which invited participants to visually map their menstrual journeys through an expressive arts exercise facilitated by trauma-informed psychologists, and No Judgement Zone, an open question-and-answer session with embryologist Dr Prateek Makwana, popularly known as Fertility Scribbles on Instagram. Participants could anonymously submit questions into a fishbowl, creating space for conversations around periods, reproductive health, sex and sexuality that many might otherwise hesitate to raise publicly.
The event also featured a panel discussion in which women creators shared personal stories about menstruation, workplace challenges, body image and diagnoses such as PCOS, with a focus on lived experiences.
"The goal was not to get women's health experts," says Saha. "We wanted independent, unapologetic, funny and feminist women sharing their own stories."
Period Party also reflects a broader question about where menstrual health conversations stand in contemporary India. While social media has made accurate information more accessible than ever before, Saha argues that openness remains uneven.
"Sex education content on the internet has helped a generation access information they never had before," she notes. "But we're still very far away from menstruation becoming completely destigmatised."
Challenges persist across social and economic divides. For some, access to sanitary products and wash facilities remains a pressing concern. For others, the obstacles take different forms: unsympathetic workplaces, doctors dismissing menstrual pain, or years-long waits for diagnoses such as endometriosis.
"Even people with access to resources often struggle to have their pain taken seriously," notes Saha.
As Period Party grows, Saha hopes the initiative can expand beyond Delhi and evolve into a self-sustaining community model that can be recreated in other cities. For now, however, the ambition remains simple: to create spaces where conversations about periods are not defined solely by stigma, statistics or medical concerns, but by connection, creativity and hope.
