Lessons from Adversary

When we face opposition, our whole energy goes in defending and proving that we are right and that the other is wrong. We forget that the person opposite us is providing the opportunity to widen our horizon and look from others' perspective. 

It is true that big lessons come from big challenges. I learned it hard way, first time.

Many of you might know that I am an expert on gender issues – conduct training, support designing and implementing gender integration strategy and do evaluations from gender perspectives. You may notice in my writings also that I always use gender neutral words. I was member of gender focal team in my earlier organizations including SDC-IC, IIRR (www.iirr.org)  and Prolinnova (www.prolinnova.net).

However, you may be surprised to know that I was never gender sensitive person earlier, and it was through a bitter fight with my adversary that I started looking from different perspective and ultimately became a gender expert. That tussle expanded my horizon, my context and ultimately shaped my career.

I studied two years P.G. Diploma course on Development Planning and Management at Pune University (Centre for Development Studies and Activities, CDSA) during 1991-93. We had semesters system –including classrooms teaching, field work and seminar/research papers where we had to select a topic, conduct research, prepare and present the report. As I learned from my seniors one of my teachers was feminist - pro-girls and anti-boys. I didn’t know that I soon be getting first hand experience.

In first semester we had written test followed by presentation of seminar papers. When result of written papers was declared, in that teacher’s particular subject we all boys had 30%-40% marks and almost all the girls got 90%-99% marks. I objected and requested the Director ‘Dr. Salil Mehta’ for re-evaluation. 

That particular teacher was also in-charge of seminar paper. As I had come from Agriculture background I selected ‘Oilseed Production: Problems and Potentials’ as my seminar paper. When I submitted my paper it was rejected on the ground that it hasn’t covered women’s issues. Integrating women’s issues in a technical topic was a totally new area for me. After that, I improved paper 2-3 times, but she rejected all. It was compulsory for me to pass in seminar paper. Therefore, I again approached the Director who was very friendly to all the students. He knew the issue, and therefore he sat down with me for two days to re-work and improve the paper. When it was submitted again, it met with the same fate again - rejection. It was apparent that she had decided to fail me in that subject.

For me there was no other way than to leave the course, return to my hometown and prepare for some other competitive exams. I informed my college and packed my luggage. During this period, the Executive Director Mr. Christopher Benninger was in USA. Fortunately, he returned back to India before my leaving, learned all the incidents and called me. He had gone through my seminar paper by that time. He said me that he is submitting my paper for evaluation in the university, and I should wait for the result. The other teacher at the Pune University evaluated the paper and gave very good marks.

After all this happened and everything cooled down, I started reflecting back and realized that throughout my life so far I never looked from women’s perspective. It was a serious flaw and thereafter I started focusing and building my knowledge on women’s issue. 

Subsequently, a couple of my research papers on women’s issues were published in ‘Times of India’ during 1994-95. In 1999 when I took charge of CARE’s pilot project, it focused on women’s issues. The project name was ‘WISH-Women’s Initiative for Self-help’ which became a star project for CARE-India. Once a CARE global team from USA, working on gender issue, visited the project to collect case studies from WISH project. We were expecting big appreciation from them, but they remarked that the project does not qualify for gender balanced development project as it is working on women’s issue, not on gender issue.

That comment was like an eye opening for me. I realized that throughout the project we focused only on women’s issues and not on gender issues – we had not included the men. The mistake was corrected in WISH replication project in 2001 when we started working with ICRISAT on crop diversification initiative, where both men and women were involved together.

This is how I was transformed from men’s centric to women’s centric to gender sensitive person from 1991-2001. Thanks to my teacher (adversary) for widening my perspective and my horizon.