“The first time that I was exposed to people from different backgrounds and cultures was when I shifted to Pune for college. Instead of big cultural shocks, it resulted in me acknowledging how having a different environment causes minor differences in instinctive thought processes. But more importantly, that with acknowledge and reflection, we can work on seeing the world the way we want to, rather than the way that we were subconsciously raised to. One of the ways that this was illustrated to me was through an incident with a roommate whose mother was a scientist- having been raised with no examples of women in STEM around me, or any conversation about such possibilities, my instinctive reaction was to regard the circumstance as too bizarre for casual conversation. This made me suddenly realize that even though I had had access to feminist literature and identified with the ideology, the absence of its practical application in my environment still influenced what I instinctively thought what other women and I could and could not practically do. This video is an effort to reflect on that, try to understand the factors that contributed to this discrepancy and try to find ways to overcome it retrospectively. It is also, hopefully, a message to anyone watching about how important positive female role models in different fields are to little girls while growing up so that they can see, instead of being told, that the sky’s the limit.”

Khushi Bajaj, Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune.

This audio-visual presentation was made by Khushi Bajaj, a student at Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune as a part of the YouthSpeak session at the WISCOMP workshop ‘Gender Equity and Inclusion: Transforming Pathways for Higher Education in India’ in August 2019 as a part of its Hamsa: Campus Equity Initiative.