“Woman role model”, a question pops up in my mind along with
this word, and the question is Who she actually is? Is she the celebrity we all
watch on the big screen and get inspired by her beauty and charisma? Is she the
one who has ridden at the top of the ladder in one of the fortune 500
companies? Is she the entrepreneur who has stood up alone to make a successful
enterprise and who now stands out high in the crowd? Or Is she the one, who
decides to stay back home building a family, who is a mother, who is the
creator of a new person, a whole new life?
Well, I believe she resides in all of them. All of them in
their own unique way is a role model, she has it all, that we may require to
take an inspiration from and be a perfect human being.
But the bitter truth is our Society in general do not like
originality, especially in woman, as it looks like defying man's
authority for a woman to prefer her own methods to accepting those laid down
for the majority.
Whether we believe it or not, it is more or less a male
dominated world, we see it everywhere. Be it the glamorous film industry where
she is believed to be a show material to be taken along the side of the main
protagonist, “the hero”. Be it the
corporate world where she is tagged to be fit for only limited jobs, even when
she is equally educated and cable as a man is. She is believed to behave in a
set way, for e.g. when a man is trying to push the things his way, he is
considered assertive, at the same time for a woman it is marked as aggression.
Be it the Open market where she is believed to be incompatible, as they say it
is a harsh world outside, and while saying so they just forget to consider who
made it harsh. Her being a woman is labelled irreconcilable for the in
conduciveness created by others.
Marrianne Williamson once said ‘Our deepest fear is
not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond
measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.’ We ask
ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? And hence there she is, fighting all odds, at
the top notch positions in all kinds of professions. In the past few decades
women have taken rapid strides in every field one could imagine. They have
persevered in the roughest and most demanding of professions and achieved
results which have surprised the whole world.
We have Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawal in the leading roles
in the movie, “gulab gang”. We have Nishi Vasudeva recently appointed C&MD
of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited. We have Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the
famous entrepreneur and C&MD of Biocon Limited, a biotechnology company.
And over and above all we have our mothers, the world cannot have a better role
model. She inspires us, instils confidence in us, and then when we achieve she
prefers sitting back home and giving all the credit of the success to us,
despite the fact that we would not have been there in first place, had she not
been there.
The world is full of such great success stories of woman
role models, and I being the part of the corporate world from last two years,
aspire to be one among them. When I joined Bharat Petroleum, I got posted in Operations,
and during the initial days I felt as if the world had fallen on my head, my
mind had all been primed up that such profile is not meant for me, and the
reason being a silly one, I being a girl am not meant to be for a profile like
that, and I kind of started hating my job, I felt kind of stuck in a bad place.
But soon I realised that when
we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and
willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that
nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will
not wait. Life does not look back. It is all
in our hand to decide whether or not to accept our destiny, and I
decided to accept it.
And soon I started seeing transformation in myself, I started
evolving as a whole new person, who is fearless to take challenges, who is no
more wrapped up inside a cocoon, who has now broken the doors of doubt created
by her own stereotyped and primed mind.
Now I have realized; it is during the times I am far outside
my element that I experience myself the most. That I see and feel who
I really am, the most! I think that's what a comet is like, you see, a comet is
born in the outer realms of the universe! But it's only when it ventures too
close to our sun or to other stars that it releases the blazing
"tail" behind it and shoots brazen through the heavens! And meteors
become sucked into our atmosphere before they burst like firecrackers and
realize that they're shooting stars! That's why I enjoy taking
myself out of my own element, my own comfort zone, and hurling myself out into
the unknown. Because it's during those scary moments, those unsure steps taken,
that I am able to see that I'm like a comet hitting a new atmosphere: suddenly
I illuminate magnificently and fire dusts begin to fall off of me! I discover a
smile I didn't know I had, I uncover a feeling that I didn't know existed in
me... I see myself.
And it all happened because I was there, in a situation,
which I felt was not meant to be in first place. It happened only because the
world is full of such woman role models, who not only brighten up their own lives,
but in the process, that brightness falls all around on the people like us and
we also aspire and work hard confidently with a hope of getting there one day.
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