National Youth Day: Meet The Inspiring Young Women Shaping India!

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India celebrates National Youth Day on January 12. This date was chosen to honour Swami Vivekananda’s birthday, one of India’s greatest spiritual and social leaders. He saw hope for the future in every child and believed that with “muscles of iron” and “nerves of steel” they could bring about social change.

Today, almost 50 per cent of India’s population is under the age of 25. The future of the country rides on their shoulders — making celebrations that empower young people so important.

Here is a quick list of some of those super inspiring youth to get you some instant motivation and inspiration!

Priya Kumar

Priya Kumar is a dynamic speaker with an entertaining style of delivering a speech. She started her career as a tuition teacher and gradually became a motivational speaker. She is famous for her interactive sessions and speaks at various seminars, conferences, and events worldwide with a unique speaking style.

Priya has won many awards and has written nine books like “The calling” to date. At the age of 24, she became one of the youngest motivational speakers, and since then she’s changing the lives of millions through her thoughts.

Devangi Nishar Parekh

Founder and co-owner of AZA, Devangi runs this multi-designer store along with her mother, Dr Alka Nishar. This mother-daughter duo is definitely an inspiration as their chain, and their designer label is currently one of the most well-established ones in the country right now.

Aditi Gupta

Women, especially young girls who have just started to menstruate or are about to start, are quite uneducated about what is actually happening to them. Hygiene is one of the most critical factors in this ignorance. Aditi Gupta, through Menstrupedia, a book series aimed to educate women and girls about their periods, has proven to be a phenomenal youth icon for the young generation of India.

P.V. Sindhu

Apart from the obvious beloved sports, cricket, there are players from other sports, who can be called Indian youth icons too. One of the most inspirational out of these is badminton ace PV Sindhu, who at the young age of 19, became India’s first medalist in women’s singles at the World Championships.

Dipa Karmakar

This young athlete managed to get a cricket-obsessed country hooked to gymnastics. She won her first bronze medal in 2014 at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. It was the first time an Indian female gymnast was able to achieve this honour.

K Manisha

Apart from being a lecturer at the Nandha College of Nursing in Tamil Nadu’s Erode district, Manisha runs an NGO called Jeevitham Foundation. Over months, she has tirelessly rescued and rehabilitated nearly 150 beggars, drug addicts, destitute, and those afflicted with terrible diseases.

Haimanti Sen

Sen is the founder of the NGO Junoon and can be found at Mumbai’s Kandivali station skywalk, teaching the alphabet, numbers, words, communication, and art and craft to over 15 kids, free of cost.

These kids are the children of the beggars who live in a slum in the vicinity. Since May 2018, Haimanti has been on a mission to equip them with the necessary skills that will enable her to enrol them in a regular school under the Right to Education act.

Parikul Bharadwaj

Being the youngest social worker in the country, this teen has been working along with her doctor’s parents in the high altitude Kedarnath region, tending to pilgrims and tourists, and providing them with medical attention. She also won the National Bravery Award for saving the lives of the two pilgrims.

Bhargsetu Sharma

When she was 20 years old, Bhargsetu swam for 12 minutes underwater and performed CPR for 21 minutes, to save a young man who was drowning in the MahiSagar river. She won several awards at the state level for her bravery and is the recipient of the prestigious Raksha Mantri Padak 2019.

Bhargsetu is also the founder of Humans with Humanity, an animal rescue, and welfare community through which she has rescued more than 3800 animals.

Ira Singhal

This UPSC topper is the first physically challenged woman to top the civil services exam in the general category. Ira topped civil services in her fourth attempt, and when asked if she ever felt of giving up, the reply was, “I wanted to work with people directly, and it was very clear in my mind. I was very clear what I wanted out of life.”

And what’s the change that she wants to bring in? “The mindset of people in our country needs to change. People are judged for little things. People make perceptions about others based on what they see. Nobody goes into depth. Nobody explores people’s potential,” she says.

National Youth Day is just a reminder to the youth of our nation that we, as a country, are relying on them and they have got all the means and ways to shape this beautifully, in their own unbiased way.

Infano salutes these wonderful young women and several others who are constantly moving forward, building a road to their dreams, and inspiring several others on the way!

Featured Image: L-R: Devangi Nishar Parekh, P.V. Sindhu, Bhargsetu Sharma, Aditi Gupta, Ira Singhal

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In India, there is a pretty good chance that you might end up dead in your mother’s womb!

Or if you are privileged enough to survive, there’s a probability that you might not see this world for long!!

India is the only large country in the world where more baby girls die than baby boys. The gender differential in child survival is currently 11 per cent, states UNICEF. Statistics reflect community attitudes with fewer hospital admissions for girls than boys, showing that parents sometimes give less attention to newborn girls. In 2017 alone, 1,50,000 fewer girls were admitted to Special Newborn Care Units (SNCUs) than boys.
Source

While this number might not look relevant to you, let’s not forget that only a mere fraction of the womenfolk are tagged privileged in India. And that’s also mainly because of the financial freedom they have got.

This might not seem relatable, but study suggests that financially independent women are more aware of their rights, lead a better life, and contribute more to the next generation. Financial freedom gives women the ability to control their life and claim their rights.

But what happens to women who are not financially secure?

A woman cannot walk out of an abusive marriage if she is not financially independent. A woman might not be able to contribute to her child’s study because of this reason. From better health to controlled life, insurances, savings, household expenditure, parents’ expenses, to whatnot, the answer is subjective!

Here are the anecdotes that I received from three women who are financially independent. Let’s understand what financial freedom means to them!

Meena Devi

“I grew up in a poor family, was married off early to an alcoholic man. While our ration requirements were taken care of with his daily wages, we couldn’t pay our child’s school fees. When he had to skip school for a whole year, I decided to work. I was not literate, so I started working as a house helper for a few families. Initially, it was hard. My salary was meagre. But I worked every day, did multiple shifts and eventually saved enough to send my son to a good school.

It’s been 15 years since I started working. My son is now a graduate. He also managed to crack the Indian Railways exam. Now he asks me not to work and live a good life. But am I not living a good life? Is working as a maid bad? After all, this very job got us where we are today. And even if I want to, I cannot stop working.

This is what made me what I’m today. I earn my own money, don’t ask anyone for anything. I have also saved some amount for my old age and bad times. I know my son is there for me. But I, too, want to be there for myself.”

[ALSO READ: This Women-Led Organisation Has Trained Self-defence To More Than 150,000 Women!]

Prerna Shah

“I come from a typical Gujarati family. My parents never stopped me from pursuing anything. However, it was my idea to get married and live as a homemaker. Mine was a love marriage! Now, intercaste marriage was something I had to fight for, but I thought it was worth it ― until we got separated.

It was his extramarital affair that made us apart. While I decided to move out with my 8YO girl, managing her, her school fees, and other necessities was not an easy task. I took up a job at a BPO, but my salary was barely enough to make ends meet.

It was not my qualifications that hindered my career; it was my lack of experience in the outer world. It was my first job, and the growth rate was lower than the acknowledgement I used to get at my in-laws for working throughout the day!

Eventually, I moved to my mother’s place to save some money. She also helped me in managing my daughter’s studies. And it was just another day when I heard her talking to our unmarried neighbour, ‘jab tak financially secure naa ban jao, shaadi mat karna!’

I know how worried she was for me and how much it hurt her to see me slogging off day and night. It was a bad phase; we got over it ― took some time, but I have grown into an independent, fierce woman now. Oh, by the way, I recently booked a flat in South Kolkata!”

[ALSO READ: This Fiery Ahmedabad Auto Driver Defied Disability To Support Her Dreams And Family!]

Namrata Singh

“I come from a very small village in Bihar. My mother had to ‘sort of’ fight for my higher education as most of the girls in our community are married off by the age of 22-23. But she fought hard for me.

While I was doing my graduation from DU, she used to send me very limited money and always used to say ‘beta, bhatak mat jaana!’ Can’t blame her!! I come from a lower-middle-class family and from a small village ― the last thing she needed in her life was to hear from someone saying ki aapki ladki toh bigad rahi hai!

So what did I do? I barely talked with boys outside the college, always kept my circle limited and partying? naah, I anyways didn’t have extra money for that!

But my life truly changed after I joined Deloitte. I was ‘probably’ the first individual (yes, not even any boy had done this) to get a job in such a big MNC from my village. I remember how hard my father tried to stop his tears when I handed him my first salary.

Forget my family, not my relatives ever asked about my marriage since that day. And no, not because I am young anymore, but because they couldn’t find a suitable match for me (yet)! Guess what? My parents have asked me to find myself a groom.

I wonder sometimes, when did they become so open-minded? And then I feel it’s not their mind that was closed; it was their hearts and thoughts. Now that they see me earning a seven-figure salary, managing my own expenses, managing half of my home’s expenditure and investing in so many SIPs and MFs, I think they know that I’m not some frog belonging to the well anymore. I’ve seen the sky now, and I won’t limit myself anymore!”

Is your story similar to any of these amazing women? What does #FinancialFreedom mean to you? Tell us your story, and we would love to tell it to the world!