Chennai: Be the best you can be. These might sound like the words of an idealist but when Kavitha Emmanuel, founder-director of Chennai-based movement Women Of Worth or WOW, says them with an impassioned tone, she makes the spirit they represent almost palpable. Having recently launched a nationwide campaign woven around women’s safety titled ‘Girl Arise’, she talks to us about her journey so far, begun in earnest after a phase of confusion not unlike what most teenagers grapple with everywhere. “As a student, I was on my way to doing something popularly accepted as desirable like being a doctor,” she laughs and adds, “That’s a phase when most of us are confused about our identities and what we want to do with our lives. I understand now that what I lacked was guidance, the kind that WOW as a movement now tries to provide to students. I needed someone to tell me that it is not necessary to go with the normative flow, you can go against the tide, use your own strength and be what you were meant to be: The best you can be.”
She goes on to share that the decision to take up literature in college has also contributed to what she does today, in its own way. “In retrospect, I’m really happy I studied literature. It carried me through a journey of discovery: I discovered who I am, what my strengths are, what I can do and what I should be standing up for. I enjoy writing, always have, and used to keep a journal with me at the time. My experiences, successes, struggles, dreams, failures… everything went in there and stayed with me,” she reminisces. Her passion for women’s rights, however, dates back to an earlier stage, when she was a little girl growing up in Chennai. She elaborates, “I would see instances of discrimination happening around me… I saw the violence my maids faced within their own homes and would go and speak to them even back then. The larger urge to do something about things like this grew with me. Then, I came to college and delved into the issues of some of my fellows too: there were those who struggled with peer pressure, family pressure, abusive relationships… I would talk to them, try and get them to stand up against it and kept working with many people on things like this over the years.”
After working for a long time informally, Kavitha finally had Women Of Worth registered as a formal organisation in 2006. She reveals, however, that its activities as a movement had already begun long before. “After marriage, I had already started doing more organised workshops. In fact, my husband and I have together conducted marriage workshops with young couples, talking to them about how in a marriage the husband and the wife are both leaders, something contrary to what most of our culture and traditions teach us. Tradition is wonderful, but it needs to be challenged where it holds back a woman in ways that no one should be held back,” she asserts.
Kavitha’s initiatives with WOW — comprising a small all-woman team, most of whom manage regular jobs simultaneously — include workshops, interactive blogs, musical concerts by the WOW-band of which she herself is a part of, campaigns and even rehabilitation work. The ‘Dark Is Beautiful’ campaign begun last year to speak up against skin colour-based discrimination in India found a staunch supporter in actress Nandita Das and continues to gather promising response across the country. ‘Girl Arise’ on the other hand, is in its initial stages and looks ahead at a long journey. Kavitha explains, “We have decided to focus on four spaces in the context of women’s safety: the home, workplace, public place and campus. We are also aiming to spread awareness about the laws available to women to protect themselves. We hope to be working with various institutions as well as corporate entities in this and also at the ground level with women themselves.”
