Thoughts

Everyone Wants to Be a “Leader.”

In eighth grade, I learned about AMUL — a dairy cooperative in India built not on hierarchy, but on collective ownership. Every farmer a decision-maker. Every member, accountable to each other. No single leader at the top. Just people who figured out how to work together at scale. AMUL became one of the largest dairy companies in the world.

That lesson never left me.

At UC San Diego, I’ve worked in student cooperatives — spaces where everyone leads and everyone follows, sometimes in the same conversation. Where decisions emerge from dialogue, not authority. Where the skill isn’t commanding a room — it’s learning to genuinely hear the person across from you, especially when their worldview is the opposite of yours.

That’s the skill nobody’s selling courses on. That’s the skill that’s actually hard.

Leadership, as we’ve constructed it, introduces a power hierarchy. And hierarchies, by nature, breed conflict — they pull energy away from the very purpose a group formed to pursue. We see this everywhere right now. The people we entrusted with our communities are failing us, and we’re realizing they were always smoke screens.

I study physics. My professor recently talked about how supermassive black holes form (actually, he always talks about that). And something about these conversations put everything in perspective — we are one species, on one pale blue dot, in one unremarkable corner of a universe so vast it dissolves every petty conflict into absurdity. We are fighting each other when we could be discovering the unknown together.

If we aligned our collective purpose to something larger than ourselves — to understanding, to discovery, to each other — money, hierarchy, and power would lose their grip almost automatically.

There’s no such thing as a born leader. There is such a thing as someone who has mastered the art of being human alongside other humans. That’s who I want to be.

Is Preaching Feminism Asking for Matriarchal Dominance?

With a recent conversation between me and my brother two years younger to me, I observed that when it comes to feminism, he was under the misconception of that being matriarchal dominance. And I did the mistake of not correcting him at that point. Pardon me for the following insensitive words but let us suppose a situation in with a skimpily dressed woman and a half-naked man on a beach. The man proceeds to sexually assault the woman and justifies it by saying “she practically asked for it because she was wearing a barely-there bikini with a very small bra”. My fellow readers, are we asking for it by getting dressed in skimpy outfits? Are we simply dressing in scandalous clothes to engage in sexual activities? Let us now reverse the roles. The woman sexually harasses the man by binding his hands and legs to a table in a secluded cabin and justifies it by saying “he was asking for it because he was half-naked, not wearing a shirt and only in his swimwear leading me on”. Was he asking for it? Was that a clear invitation? I think not.

Living in the three-tier-city of Haridwar, since I was a child, I had been forbidden to wear anything that did not go below my knees and past my biceps. No sleeveless t-shirts, no spaghettis, no shorts, no shorts dresses, no skirts, no see-through clothes. Why, you wonder? “Oh, you’ll get such cheap stares out in public!”, “it’s a factory premises, what will they think?”, “it’s not safe, change your clothes”. And if my bra-strap happened to slide past my shoulders down my bicep…Alas! I have sinned by displaying the obvious. I shall be punished, in school and at home. So instead of making us learn to fight off these advances, these habits, we were taught to hide, to cover ourselves.

A few days ago, a brawl ensued between a man and a woman — whom I assumed were married — on the main road. She claimed that he was violent with her, he was a drunkard, and he beat her up in front of their two kids too. It rattled me very deeply, having witnessed an incident such as this for the first time since I had been living in a shelter, in a cocoon. While discussing this incident with my family on the dinner table, I said what had been playing in my mind. I said “That woman must feel so helpless, so unsafe, especially being surrounded by men only.” I was aggravated of course, and in my hazy state of panic and shock I may also have said something that I did not mean entirely. My father proceeded to ask me “Do you think men are stupid? Foolish?” And my knee-jerk reaction was to say “Yes! Of course, they are”. A different argument ensued thereon, but the next morning it struck my mind that that was the sort of mentality I had been surrounded with. Because why else had I been asked to not wear shorts? Were men that stupid that they had no control? No etiquettes? No morals? No conscience and consciousness? Why can I not wear what I want without any fear? Why can I not be allowed to be comfortable in my sexuality? Why do I even need to be allowed to be comfortable in my sexuality? Isn’t that my right? Is it my fault that I don’t feel safe when I go out for cycling in the evening? Is it my fault if I get raped?

Another observation I made and so have many others is the ban on torso nudity of women on Instagram, unlike in the case of men. I’m not sure I quite understand the reasons behind that. These small things have been so inconspicuously incorporated in our routines, our daily lives, our habits, our thinking that majority of the time, we fail to realize we’re even participating in them.

Feminism is not dominance of females over males, it is simply a movement, an activity to gain equal rights, equal status as that of a man. I am a feminist. I want my rights. To my orthodox teachers, the elders in my family and in the families of other girls, to my younger and elder brothers, my boyfriends and to my sisters, girlfriends, mothers, grandmothers; are we not humans?