WHAT IS YOUR CULTURE/HERITAGE?
I consider myself Indian, but I do have some Bangladeshi heritage as well. For most part though, my ancestors are from the region of West Bengal, in North-East India.
WHAT MADE YOU JOIN HER CULTURE?
I will be going abroad for my undergraduate education, so I wanted some way to keep in touch with my roots. I came upon Her Culture by accident, but it immediately appealed to me. I also loved the 'Girl power' theme it has, so I applied to join it on my very first visit to the site. It was also a safeguard against homesickness; it is too expensive to travel back and forth more frequently than once a year if that from college, which is in the States to India. I went to boarding school, so I know that after a point I do miss home. It was a win-win situation all around!
HOW COULD YOU SEE CULTURAL AWARENESS CHANGE THE WORLD?
Besides the obvious benefits like the end of racism and any kind of racial profiling, I feel that people would become more self aware. Valuing your culture gives you a different perspective. It sets you apart from people in a way that you feel included because everyone has a different culture, it's not just you, but you feel that sense of individuality.
WHAT'S THE WORST PROBLEM IN THE WORLD TODAY?
According to Hinduism, the world is in 'Kalyug' or the 'Age of Darkness'. There are a lot of social issues plaguing the world today. The problem is that they are all inter-linked. The growing population leads to income disparity, which means more poverty, which means the next generation of those affected may not be well-educated, which leads to unemployment, which has an inverse relation with inflation, again responsible for the stagnant state of the present economy, which is in a crisis. We just can't single out any one problem as the worst.
HOW DO YOU THINK WE CAN FIX THAT PROBLEM?
While I understand the need to try and resolve all issues, not placing importance to any one over the other save responding to immediate threats, particularly those in the eyes of the media and therefore the public, I believe that this deters efficiency. I think setting rigid structures for individual problems into place, not necessarily in the form of layers of bureaucracy, but more as think tanks and focus groups would be a good start. Isolate the problem, tackle it head-on, then implement it considering the other real-world factors. If you start out with limited options, you get limited solutions; and while you could say that this is avoiding looking at the bigger picture, when the picture is being ruined for want of attention to the details which are as problematic as poverty, I'm sure you'll agree that treating them as is not the issue at hand here.
WHAT'S ONE FAMILY TRADITION THAT YOU WANT TO PASS ONTO YOUR CHILDREN?
The biggest annual festival for Bengalis is the Durga Puja, during which different temples put up elaborate structures called 'puja pandals'. Entire families go 'pandal-hopping', which, yes, exactly like club-hopping except you're visiting places of worship. But we have great fun there, and it's a whole other level of family bonding. My Indian friends in the States tell me that it's a thing there too, so even if I settle there, I will carry it on. India basically has hundreds of different festivals, and I want to pass those on to my children.
WHICH WOMEN INSPIRE YOU?
I like quirky, bold people. Like Katherine Langley, I wrote one of my college essays on her. She was the first woman in the House of Representatives back in the 1920s and on her first day in, she wore an absurd blue gown trimmed with red fur to make sure that she was noticed and her voice would be heard. She didn't care that she was ridiculed as long as she got her message across. I admire that.
Emily Murphy is another great lady. She worked to revise a law that said that women were not regarded as persons. When I first read about it, I was appalled. When you imagine a world where you aren't thought of as a person, you see things with much more clarity. The world has progressed, and it will progress, because of women like Emily Murphy, women born everyday. One day, it will seem ridiculous that the social issues of today were even issues up for debate. I hope to be someone who can contribute in whatever way to that. In pop culture, I would say Emma Stone. There's something about her self-deprecating yet unapologetic attitude that I like.
WHAT IS YOUR DEFINITION OF A #CULTUREREVOLUTION?
I would say that a 'Culture Revolution" has taken place when the celebration of culture is an innate part of our culture itself. I think it is unrealistic to expect exact equality in gender and racial breakdown anywhere, but I look forward to the day when it's not a big deal at all, because it is expected that the cultural barrier won't exist.
Women were traditionally the ones who brought up the children, instilled values in them, passed on the culture. Today, those gender norms have been broken. There are many, many single fathers across the world today, and the culture revolution will be realized when the gender equity is. My message to all women is that the culture revolution isn't about taking it forward just as a gender, but about teaching the opposite sex about how to advance with us. After all, culture is all mankind's.
JULY 2014
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