 Like every other child I wanted a doll with blue eyes and golden hair and instead he gave me this black doll and he said black is beautiful too. Now it's too much to understand at age seven what black is beautiful is and I thought he was some kind of queer creature. But it was this kind of very gentle feedback that I was getting constantly from my father and then of course at one point I suddenly discovered the value of all this and thought that I was very gifted because I had this very special childhood. I came of a family where no one would even dream of stalking anyone. I was always a child and being dominated by my friends or everybody. Yeah but then my scenario changed when I was in third year. I thought I could save a few boys from ragging. I became quite a mustan. My mother used to hit me a lot. She used to pull my hair and drag me in the streets. But the more I used to hit her, the more I got to know her. And she used to hit me and go to my grandmother and tell me that grandmother, what is the sin for a educated woman? I've never felt when I was a child that I was any different that I would have been any different if I had been a boy. Things would have been different if I had been a boy. We didn't have any brothers with three sisters. And we even have felt that we lacked anything or that we were handicapped in any way because we were female. Never. If you keep our gender depressed, male or female, well that gender will not grow. It's like stunting the growth and make it a bonsai of a tree. I have been allowed as a woman, as a child, as a girl to grow. Grow as far as I can go. I think if a woman is brought up to believe that she's in some way subsidiary, subservient or second class, she will fulfill that prophecy. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. From my own experience, I think I owe everything I am to my mother, who was a professional herself. She was a leading gynecologist in Bombay and from a very early age, I was trained to believe that every woman should have a career, that every woman should express herself to her full potential. Each is imperative for the other. To exist, to grow, to become. Complimentary halves of a whole. No rigid compartmentalizations. Therefore, no conflicts and categories. Perhaps, especially so for a woman. Because she is a mother, wife, teacher, worker, child. The leader and the lead.