Shownotes

My guest on the 46th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast this week is Chandana Agarwal, President North, 82.5, Ogilvy Group, India. With over 2 decades in advertising she has helped launch and build brands in India that have been appreciated globally and have gone up to win international Creative and Effectiveness awards.

In this episode we talk about her growing up as a girl in Hyderabad; her lived experiences; her journey into advertising

👉🏾 Surviving/thriving in agency culture; fitting in and being more 'man than a man'

👉🏾 Unpacking what it means to be a single woman in India; shifting the victim mindset

👉🏾 Norms of beauty, a legacy of India's colonial past

👉🏾 Setting up the Marigold Society for Performing Arts, how it anchors her sense of femininity, beauty, giving her a voice and an identity beyond work

👉🏾 Setting up Subah, an initiative to support women who have lost their husbands or partners in the pandemic

👉🏾 The people who inspire her and being her own favourite person. 

Thank you Chandana for sharing your time, for being driven by your dreams and passions.

Memorable Passages from the episode

👉🏾 Thank you so much Sudha for having me over and it's so lovely what you're doing, bringing so many perspectives and point of views from different cultures together. So hats off to you. 

👉🏾 Yeah, so we're two siblings, I'm the younger daughter of the two of us really. Thankfully I grew up in the South of India. We're North Indians who grew up in Hyderabad. For the listeners who don't know where Hyderabad or how India works, Largely there is the Aryan culture in the North and there is the Dravidian culture in the South. Hyderabad happens to be a cosmopolitan city in the South and that's when I grew up. It was a bit of a mixed bag for me, really thinking back. My father comes from a very large family and he has many younger brothers. And I think after my mother all his brothers ended up having daughters and therefore my mother kind of bore the cross of starting the trend of having only daughters and I think somewhere it rubbed off on my psyche. I was made to feel, almost grateful for being alive. 

👉🏾There was a lot of pressure on my parents to say, I wish you had a son, the younger child should have been a son. Though my parents never consciously or subconsciously even hinted at that, but I think that baggage, that pressure was always there. There was a great hurry to be financially independent. I was always excelling at what I did, because I don't think there was luxury to kind of take life as it comes. All my choices in my subjects was based on the career prospects that they would open up rather than what I really wanted to do. And I just think that what I'm saying is not unique to me. It's true for the entire generation of women, all of us that grew up at that time in the country. 

👉🏾 So yeah, there was a hurry to kind of learn how cycle to learn how to kind of get on a scooter you know you were just in a hurry waiting to grow up and make yourself useful. 

👉🏾 That's an interesting story in itself. In the year that I was graduating from my MBA Institute, there were not too many marketing companies that came to the campus and I did not make it to the few that came. And I kept crying and crying and weeping and my father kept trying to reach me and I refused to come on the phone, obviously, there were no mobile phones in those days. And finally, he got across to me and he said, "Bhai, what is happening? Why are you crying?" And I was like, My career is over I have not cracked a job. And my dad told me one thing that stood me in good stead. He said, a company only gives you a job, you make your career. And that just propelled me into taking things in my own hands. I left the campus, I took a bus to Bangalore. I went knocking to various advertising agencies and I thankfully cracked a job with FCBUlka.

The rest is history as they say or we make history as we go along.

👉🏾 No Sudha, I think you or we or all of us at that time, got into a kind of tunnel vision. We wanted to fit in. We wanted to prove that we are more 'men than men' around. We kind of dressed in a certain way, we spoke a certain language. We wanted to prove to the world that we could take it on our chins and still stand tall. All of us and I shouldn't be talking for everybody, but me personally, I'm very ashamed to admit this, but I used to say, "Oh my God, there's a woman driver, I don't know what is going to happen".

👉🏾 So you wanted to disassociate yourself from being a woman and you tried really hard to be more man than a man even. I guess at that time it didn't faze us, we were all hungry, we were all trying to fit in. We all wanted to kind of prove to the world that we could be as good. Looking back, I do believe that a lot of time could have been saved. A lot of work could have been more productive. A lot of heartache could've been saved if we were who we were. But I don't think any of us realised at that time that we were curbing who we intrinsically are. 

👉🏾 I remember, I started smoking because most of the conversations would happen in the balcony outside and you wanted to be a part of that conversation. I would see matches because I wanted to be a part of conversations and sports does not interest me at all because I believe unless you've played a sport you can't really vibe with it. Following matches and to smoking and to living a certain way. Women should be born in their forties and then they should find the way back. I think forties is so liberating

👉🏾 I just think firstly there’s somethings about being a single person, which are universal irrespective of the gender or the country, which is you need to do create self-love. You need to love yourself enough. You need to kind of value yourself, respect yourself, find yourself interesting enough to spend time with yourself. You need to be extremely disciplined, I think, because I've seen a lot of friends from home being single is a phase right? They're single for the weekend, or they're single for a week. And the choices you make are very different. But being that this is your life, then you need to lead a certain way.

👉🏾 So I think those are some of the things that are universal about being single. And then there are somethings which is, what happens when you fall sick? The fact that the society looks at you be a little more dishonourable or that many friends don't want to save your number under your name, the fact that women friends don't want to invite you on the weekends when they are with their family. 

👉🏾 So there's a lot into being a single woman and then there is the whole world of do's and don'ts about being a single woman in India, in Haryana right? Which is one of the most patriarchal societies in the world, which is the whole judgemental-ness of people. The fact that right from the security guard to your next door neighbour is looking at you suspiciously, 

👉🏾 So yeah, I think that being single, there is so much expectation that you start seeing yourself as a victim and every small incident becomes a symbol of something larger. And I think somewhere in my head, I changed that about seven years back and that's led to a very positive attitude, both in my own reaction to the world and I think in turn the world's reaction to me. If I called the carpenter home to do some repair job, and he came about 2 hours late, in my mind I used to process it as, because I am a single woman and because I'm a woman who's asking him to come and he knows that there's no man in my house, he believes he can get away by taking it for granted. And when I change that to believing that I'm not the victim, he's a poor guy, who's working somewhere else and maybe his job didn't get over on time and I started seeing him as the victim, I think everything for me has changed since that time. It's very easy for me now. I think everybody respects me for who I am and what I do.

👉🏾 So I think the long and short of it is this, that it's not easy to be a single person anywhere in the world. You need to love yourself, but you also need to kind of change the mindset. I think it's more in our minds than in the world's mind and if you become a giver I think everything is easy. 

👉🏾 Sudha I think, I was an extremely complex and complicated child now that I look back and think about it. Because I was a north Indian who grew up in south and I was dusky complexion as I continue to be. There was a lot of finger pointing, that happened. I used to dread the time that I used to go back to visit my relatives during my summer vacations because I constantly heard she's become like somebody who belongs to Madras, which essentially means that you're dark complexion, and there would be a lot of conversation with my mother to say, get her to eat this, get her to drink this. Why don't you take care of her, why don't you do this? How would she get married? So being dark was something that was looked down upon. Constantly, you know, things like this colour will not go well on you. Red you can't wear, Yellow you can't, this lipstick you can't wear. 

👉🏾 Every time I went for a wedding. I was made to dance on 'jiski biwi kaali' and I used to dread that. But at that time I used to go and hide and run. And I remember I used to give my new clothes to my best friend to wear because I thought it would look better on her. So being dark complexion, dusky complexion was one thing and then there was this whole thing of being the son, not being the son, being a boy, not being a boy, being a girl, not being a girl.

👉🏾 So between these two, I really didn't know who I was what I wanted to be and what is it that I wanted to project to the world. I think since then I've come a long way. And I'm extremely comfortable with who I am and I can wear all the colours that I want to. I wear all kinds of clothes that I feel very good about being who I am. So I believe that women are almost cordoned or boxed off as per the society's norms of what being beautiful is. And that's been true for so many cultures rights? So I guess it's the same thing that continues and I think it's up to us to kind of feel good and then feel beautiful.

👉🏾 That's true. There can't be an excuse for this yeah. The first excuse comes to my lips is , that's what the market buys, but hey, there's no excuse for that. 

👉🏾 I just think that there's never any one thing that leads to an action like this. I think lots of things in the universe come together, collude together to kind of push in a certain direction. In my case when I look back at why this happened, it can be one or two triggers, but this space Marigold and dance occupies in my life is something that possibly words cannot capture.

👉🏾 It's made me anchor my sense of femininity, beauty. It's given a stage, it's given a voice, it's given a language to who I really think I am. In fact, people say that I use my hands a lot more than most people right? So they believe that I carry the aura of being a dancer in my corporate world as well. So specifically at that point of time in my life I used to learn dance at somebody's house and for whatever reasons she didn't want me to continue there. So there was reason for me to kind of start my own academy because dance I knew was going to continue to play an important role in my life.

👉🏾 Dance itself had given me a lot of joy, a lot of confidence, a lot of beauty. And I wanted to spread that to other women, and that was the other reason why I wanted to start Marigold. So while all of this was happening, I just think through dance, I've connected to so many beautiful, wonderful, strong women from fields that I would've never interacted with earlier. I've created good karma because I get such lovely messages for being the medium through which people have fulfilled their childhood dreams of being on the stage, of continuing dance, of being cured out of their depression and grief. 

👉🏾 Also, I think professionally the glass ceiling exists for women, no matter what we say and very frequently our sense of identity starts getting fused with the designation on our visiting cards. And I know you've gone through struggle with that for some time. And I think Marigold somewhere allowed me to create a cushion for myself. It allowed me to define myself in a way that wasn't just linked to my job. So in that sense, I'm really, really grateful for having found dance or for dance having found me. 

👉🏾 Thank you for bringing it up, it's something that we started on the 17th of May. I went through COVID all alone right? And that was a vulnerable time for the entire world and being alone kind of brings out various insecurities to the fore right? So I first started by creating a volunteer group in my own condominium, where I got the RWA to invest in a few oxygenators, a few cylinders and a few steroids, life-saving drugs to say that we know we need to have this in our condominium, God forbid any of our own residents feel that. Because in my own head, I was just battling with this whole thing that God forbid, something happens to me, who do I reach out to what will happen to me? So I think it came from self-defence and it just opened up a world to me. We all saw the outpouring of humanity that happened. 

This is essentially for women who've lost their husbands or partners to the pandemic. And we realised that no, this kind of grief is very, very unique. In the sense, most of them were not able to bid goodbye to their partners and this was all sudden, it happened in a period of 10 to 15 days. Most of them saw their husbands go to the hospital and then never come back. They were not there as a part of the last rites. They did not get to experience the grief and therefore live through trauma. And there was a need for these women and what they're going through, nobody else can go through and there's nobody who can talk to them about it, except for other women who are going through a similar grief. 

👉🏾 And therefore Subah is our attempt at creating an ecosystem for women by doing multiple things. So a) We're an ecosystem and we've got tie-ups with lots of coaches and counsellors and we train them on grief handling. Each Braveheart as we call them, because we don't like to use the word widow. Each brave heart is assigned a buddy or a coach depending on her life stage. We do a lot of career counselling, we've helped women restart their careers. We've got tie-up with some of the best people in Korn Ferry who kind of train women, how to create their LinkedIn profile, how to apply for jobs, how to prepare for interviews. We do a lot of financial advisory in terms of all the money that they're getting from their husbands PF account, gratuity, et cetera. How would they invest it to make sure that their kids future safe. We do a lot of taxation consultancy. We do a lot of legal consultancy. On the Saturday we are doing a session with what is the emergency first aid you can give to children because all of them are single parents now. So yeah, the attempt is to be able to create an ecosystem of volunteers and supporters who can help Bravehearts rebuild their life. 

👉🏾 We've got 178 Bravehearts. We're a community of 320 people as of today, so that’s a 170 Bravehearts and the rest of them are volunteers. So out of the 176, I think we've touched everybody's life in some way or the other. So there's a WhatsApp group, there's a Facebook group, they all connect with each other. They've now formed almost city-wise circles and we've got people from US, Australia, Bihar, Assam across the world. And they all find support within their own age group. We've got a Noida group now who meets offline once in a week, they go to each other, so children's birthday parties etcetera. So I think somewhere Subah has brought a ray of light not just the 176 Bravehearts but to the 300 odd people in the community.

👉🏾 I think Chandana is evolving, I think we're all work in progress. I don't think Chandana can be captured in one or two words or adjectives. I love being a woman, right? I love the feminine gender and we are on the first Navaratra which celebrates the feminine energy. I absolutely revel in being who I am, I love myself. In that movie 'Jab We Met this woman says 'Main aapni favourite person hoon' (I am my own favourite person).

👉🏾 I also believe I'm a woman of action, I'm extremely resilient. I think life makes you resilient, I don't think any of us is born like that. But yeah, I think who I've become today is a strong, resilient, opinionated, khadus woman being who she is. I think I'm spoilt and I take pride in it. 

👉🏾 I think self-made people inspire me, I think I'm complex about not having the pedigree that I would've wanted. I would have want it to be a Harvard graduate, which I am not. I believe that people who create themselves, people who kind of, build themselves up from scratch are people I respect and admire.

👉🏾 And there’s inspiration all around I think all of us are Mothers. I think the Bravehearts that I interact with are phenomenal women right? For me, 2 things that I respect in people are honesty and resilience and the ability to kind of be self-made to not be faced down by what life throws at you. And I think an average woman inspires me. All women, I think face so much and go to so many challenges.

👉🏾 Not at all Sudha, Thank you so much and tight hug.

Follow Chandana Agarwal on: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chandana-agarwal-3313816/

Twitter: @0dc21330495d4b2

Marigold Society of Performing Arts: https://www.facebook.com/kathak.marigold/

Important Links

👉🏾 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/gurgaon/how-you-label-something-will-define-how-far-it-can-go/articleshow/77829066.cms

👉🏾 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/gurgaon/boxed-in-stereotypes-how-women-have-been-depicted-on-the-screen/articleshow/81132029.cms

👉🏾 https://gurgaonmoms.com/sharetocare-series-with-chandana-agarwal/