 In India, many girls do not feel safe, wanted, free or equal. I started my work as a women's rights activist really. And what led me to do that was my own life and a personal tragedy. I grew up in a very patriarchal home. My parents are refugees from Pakistan and they settled in Pune, which is near Mumbai. That's where I was born. And my father raised me to be this good girl. Submissive, docile, obedient, to be a good wife, mother, daughter-in-law, and someone who will serve others and be good, be beautiful. I didn't like it, but I thought that's the way it is for girls. When my brothers went out to play cricket and I and everyone's clothes or helped my mother in the kitchen, I would ask her why I couldn't do things that my brothers did. And she said that, no, this is the way it is for girls. I was going to school and into a very good school, by the way, because my father had come up in life by then. At the same time, education was not really important. And that's not what we talked about. And for my life, the aspiration that they had for me and that they built in me was that I would marry well and have a good husband who would provide for me. And then I would be a good, dutiful, obedient wife and have children, raise them well, you know. I didn't like it. And in my mind, I was rebellious and my father was not angry with me. He said, you're not submissive and you won't be happy. That made me very angry. And I think that might have been the first sign of my feminist consciousness rising, you know. When I was 27, I got a call from my mother one day saying that your cousin has burnt. And you should go to Delhi. She was 24. She had a two-year-old daughter and she was matted to a chartered accountant, mind you. Went to the same school as me. I did. When I went there, she was dead. And they tried to pass it off as a suicide. And I don't think it was suicide. It was never proven and we didn't take it because my family didn't do anything about it. Because nobody burns yourself to death with a two-year-old sleeping upstairs. What this did was it totally shook me out of my, you know, semi-comfortable life. I started to then go to schools and colleges and talk to girls about, you know, how you should protest and you shouldn't let this happen. And then I realized, God, they're as clueless as I was. I didn't know that I had a right to my own life and to an equal life, an autonomous life and they didn't either. Now, see, when people talk about education for girls, they think about they should complete. It should be a quality education. And then they're good. My school gave me many academic skills, but it didn't give me the important knowledge that I have the right to use these skills for myself, to live a life of my own choice. I have the right to protest. I have the right to be equal. I said, that's what education should be about. I started with just six children in my garage, not knowing what I was doing but wanting to learn and I looked at the children and I learned. And now we directly serve 8,000 schools. We work with five schools in rural areas, urban areas, with middle-class children, very poor girls, very marginalized youth in a college that we have. We have community-based centers. We work with special needs children. And our vision for all of them, this very diverse set of population is that we should educate them for gender equality, for social justice, for personal flourishing and for active democratic citizenship. So I developed a critical feminist pedagogy pedagogy and then a curriculum, a teacher training module, in which now over these last 37 years we have trained 100,000 teachers and we've reached 5 million children. I mean, I can't even count the number of members in the community. And the goal is really to try and transform education so that it focuses on the real problems of life. The UN resolution which came out three days ago, it talks about four things. It says we should teach children, we should learn to be, learn to do, learn to live together and learn to learn. Guess what? We've been doing all of that for the last 37 years, right? Who am I and how am I related to the universe and others in it? So it means that you first of all position yourself relationally to the universe. Do everyone in it? Look at your social structure, critically. Look at the power dynamic in that social structure, especially patriarchal structures in terms of class, in terms of gender, in terms of race, caste. And then you try and understand what democracy means, what equality means, where you want to be and what kind of a relationship should you have. You have to change the curriculum totally out of date. You should actually be centered around the SDGs. And by the way, students love dealing with real problems and putting their mind to it and they are so creative and this is their life, this is their future. How will they navigate that? We're in a state of crisis, climate crisis, peace crisis, maybe economic crisis, who knows? And how are they going to navigate all of this if they haven't been thinking about these things? So to my mind, education should be about these problems. We should teach our children to think critically about them. And all the foundational skills should be centered and acquired. So yes, we should keep teaching math, science, history, geography, all the stuff, good stuff we've been doing. But what's the perspective? Lessons of equality have a place at the core of the curriculum and they should determine how we teach the math, the science, the history, the geography. And I think we really need to transform education. I've been doing this all my life now, well half my life and a little more. And I think I'll be spending the rest of my life doing that too and hopefully we'll make a change. What are some of the examples of how this education, including critical thinking, including lessons of equality, how I can transform girls and boys' lives at such a young age? This girl, Lakshmi, she was 11 when she came to us. And she was working at the time. She was cleaning homes. But the school was in the afternoon until she came. And her mother died at 13, leaving her with a one-year-old, a five-year-old, an eight-year-old, an 11-year-old, and herself. She pretty much raised that family. But you know what? She says that it was because of the critical dialogues and because of the critical pedagogy that we use, the feminist pedagogy, that she learned to have a self. She went on to get a bachelor's and MBA. Today she runs her own business and now is married to a man of her own choosing who respects her, treats her as an equal person and is going to have a baby. My school taught me to respect myself and fight for my life. I hope that my story will give strength to girls around the world. We realise that this won't work unless we work with boys too. And here's our approach with them. We are trying to let them to see that, you know, even though patriarchy is not their fault, they have been guilty. But it gives them unfair power and privilege and it's very cruel to their sisters, their mothers, their aunts, all the women they love. And so what can they do? And we also try to build a sense of empathy, first of all, with women and their lives. Secondly, we get them to look at how patriarchy does not do well for them either. It has created a toxic masculinity that is not serving them either. Gives them power, also makes them very violent. And when you're violent with others, you're also violent with yourself. It puts enormous pressure to be the only provider for your children, your wife and your parents. And what we've done for that is we've developed curricula and then we have these critical dialogues at least once a week. And I'm telling you, it has had an impact. Boys have changed. They're starting to help at home. They're also impacting their peers. So they're trying to get them to see, hey, this is not a good thing. Standing there and harassing girls, talking about girls in such an objectified manner and sexualizing them so much, not a good thing. They have feelings. And we should be respecting them. They have been standing up to their fathers at home in cases of violence. And so it does make a difference. It changes lives.