Getting out of the comfort zone
By Palashi Vaghela
About 6 months ago, I looked at my life and felt comfortable. Perhaps a little too comfortable. My body could practically live through the day without my consciousness being involved in the activities at all if it wanted to. The routine had been learned and I was doing what I was trained for. I was a technical consultant at a leading business solutions firm in Bangalore. What was supposed to be a year of exploration for a dazed girl with a degree in engineering became a year of unimaginable convenience. You see, I was very comfortably protected in my shell of ideas and notions about the world. I did not meet people or come across work that shook my understanding of a certain phenomenon.
A life of quantified reality - I knew exactly what needs to be done, how it needs to be done and how it would qualify for assessment. I knew what the conversations over lunch with my colleagues would be like and what their opinion on the national debates would be: a perspective all too exhausted by us coming from similar backgrounds and realities. But more importantly, I couldn’t relate to the work I was doing. Not that I or the corporation was not doing important work, but I just couldn’t help but be disinterested in fixing a business problem for a Fortune 500 company using technology. I wanted to be a part of a bigger dialogue around the issue I felt deeply concerned about—gender. The year 2014 was one filled with debates around gender roles and of the voices that were raised against violence against women. I knew the feminist in me wanted to go get my hands dirty to help identify this gender divide and the engineer in me wanted to work on it so as to fix it.
“And somewhere there are engineers helping others fly faster than sound. But, where are the engineers helping those who must live on the ground?[i]”
More often than not, we tend to forget the purpose of education. I don’t think I thought about it as seriously before I came across Feminist Approach to Technology (FAT). I liked working with technology, but engineering was cast as too unimaginative a space for me to look for an alternative context that I would actually enjoy working with. With little knowledge of feminist science studies and the gendered nature of use, access and creation of technology I decided to apply for FAT. The decision to join FAT for me was like signing up for space exploration. I had little or no idea of what it was going to be like. All that I knew was that I was being hired as a STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) resource to work on the idea of a Jugaad Lab. But boy, was I totally swept away by what FAT had in store for me!
My first day was a hustle and I noticed an air of lightness in the workplace. Warm hugs for welcome were apparently a norm. From where I hailed, physical contact was minimal and conversations about weekends homogeneous. I began my journey with a very interesting and informative workshop on CEDAW. Although an outsider, I felt like I fitted right in when the conversations on our common point of interest began. It was as if that was one place I could speak without having to belong to the organization because I knew that the points I would make are going to be identified with. I was elated! Identification of discrimination became a cozy little meeting point for me to bond with the new team and I had this new-found space to talk about it where I won’t have to constantly defend my stance as a feminist. Heck, I could finally proudly call myself a feminist here! I did not have to fear the backlash of people who didn’t get it and I could finally move beyond justification of its existence to doing something concrete within its framework. I discovered the vocabulary to talk about the freedom of a woman’s existence in her own right and how it can shape society.
In the two months that followed, I have learned tremendously and unlearned even more. My first interaction with the girls of Jugaad Lab has to be one of the most overwhelming experiences ever. While I knew I had a huge challenge ahead of me in terms of setting up a Lab where we could enable the participation and interest of women in STEM fields, I had overlooked the fact of working with teenagers coming from completely different situations and realities from what I was used to. Being vicarious to women of a different age group who live through things you have probably never experienced in your life was a challenging experience, to say the least.
I felt an immense responsibility towards these young girls, pretty much from the first day I met them. I knew it was a long way before they truly became independent thinkers and with time found out the complexities of realizing a goal that seemed simple but had hidden dimensions. But the wonderfully significant thing that happened was that I could feel my notions of feminism, gender roles, societal norms, class, caste and family being overthrown by these young women trying to negotiate their place within a deeply biased setup. Things that shook my bones were taken by these women in an almost unbelievable manner of lightness and courage, almost as if there was a playfulness involved in this process of rebellion. Given the right tool, medium, vocabulary and means, these young women were fully equipped and aware of the struggles they had to fight. Perhaps, even more than the elite, bookish feminists, notorious for being linear in their thinking and not looking critically at assumptions made along the way (me being one of them).
One such fascinating woman was Asha, who has probably now become immortal in the spirit of FAT as an organization. She, in her very short period of interaction with me, taught me (without an intention of actually doing so) the importance of playfulness and the need for enjoying the process of changing the mindsets of people you are going to work with in FAT. Her actions stated loud and clear that the issues we deal with may be serious, but we need not be unimaginative and boring about it.
Both Delhi and FAT, have brought with them brilliant surprises to a Palashi who had become a happy frog in a well, and quite unknowingly so! The mere fact that FAT’s team has a mix of people from different backgrounds makes it an awesome place to have chai and debates with. The team has pretty much been my family in the new city and helped the uptight me, loosen up a bit! It is a slow and a gradual transition from a corporate mindset to that which would suit the ever evolving goals and processes here at FAT. But it is this discomfort that makes me glad. The organic nature of this work is what makes it beautiful and I hope to bring the best of my previous experience to this one while getting rid of the unnecessary baggage.
So look around and think loudly about your life. Are you comfortable enough? If yes, then it’s also time for you to push yourself beyond the known. Challenge your notions. If you don’t know where to start, give us a small nudge here at FAT and we’ll shake things up for you. FAT’s pushed me into the face of the unknown and I now wake up looking forward to each of those nine hugs I’ll be getting at 9 AM every day!
Palashi Vaghela is a new team member at FAT handling our newest pilot project—Tech Center 2.0—a Jugaad Lab for young girls to explore and experiment with science and technology.
