14/08/2016
Why this engineer from Bengaluru quit her high-paying job and moved to the remote mountain villages of Uttarakhand
I trek to the extremely isolated villages and live there with the locals. The taboos around menstruation are very extreme in the areas where I work. These areas follow some extremely archaic traditions, many of which are undocumented anywhere else. During their period, women drink cow urine and sprinkle it in their homes to ‘purify’ themselves, sleep in the cowshed with the livestock, sit apart, do not touch people, do not touch water directly, do not attend religious events, and have many more such restrictions. This is mostly because they are afraid of the ‘gods’. Menstruating women who have broken these rules are often blamed for lack of rains or for leopard attacks. Animal sacrifice is rampant and is performed to appease the gods.
For the past nine months, Brinda Nagarajan has been trekking to some of Uttarakhand’s remotest villages and conducting workshops to increase awareness about menstruation among locals. The lack of information about a biological process like menstruation is disturbing, and she has found incidents like those mentioned above to be alarmingly common.
she says.
Hence, when Brinda made the not-so-lucrative decision of quitting her well-paying job in the prime of her career to take up a rural development fellowship which would cost her an 80 percent salary cut, her family was more than supportive. Her father, a chemical engineering and materials science alum of IISc Bangalore. is also helping her out with low-cost, 100 percent biodegradable sanitary pads. While family support came easily, there were a few who ridiculed Brinda for her decision.
“It was hard, but I stood by my decision.”