Author Rashmi Bansal’s new book, Touch the Sky (Rs199; Westland Books), brings to the fore stories of girls and women fighting for their rights to shatter taboos around things like playing football, contesting elections and educating fellow women about menstrual health. It is a crowd-sourced book created with the help of viewers of Zee TV, who conceptualised the idea. t2 caught up with Bansal at Karma Kettle over steaming cups of chai. Excerpts:

How was the process of writing Touch the Sky different from writing your other books?

The subject is different and it came with its own set of challenges. People are not so comfortable talking about their personal lives and even if they were going through a lot of difficulties or struggles, they would brush it under the carpet. So I didn’t realise that talking to people about personal issues was going to be challenging. I think the ones who have spoken to me are the ones whose families have supported them in a big way. There must be thousands of millions of stories of people who are in equally difficult circumstances but they don’t feel that they can speak up.

So I think the purpose of this book really is to send this message that all of us are facing some challenge or the other and it is in our power to overcome it and to speak up. None of these women are well-known — they’re ordinary women like the ones who could be living in your building or in any village in India. It took me a lot more screening. Initially, we got a lot of stories through crowd-sourcing. Then we narrowed it down to 50. Then we met about 30. And some of them had to be eliminated because the story could not be verified from multiple people.

Much of the book is written in Hinglish. Why did you make this choice?

All my books face this accusation. Even about Stay Hungry Stay Foolish (2008), there are people who said, “Oh, it’s not written in English.” But from the very start of my career in journalism, I’ve always had this style where I have a few words of Hindi along with English because it helps to express emotions more effectively. Most of my books have been based on interviews and when people talk to you, they’re talking about things, which they feel about. They lapse into Hindi and then those words can’t be translated accurately. This particular book, I thought, is more for a mass audience and it’s not really for a small set of people so this is how it came naturally. I felt it has to be a mix because nobody speaks pure Hindi or English. We all speak a mix of languages. There is a Hindi edition also of this book, by the way! 

Of all the stories you tell, is there a favourite or one which stuck with you?

I like all the stories but I think the story about Yuwa girls is my favourite because it’s such a simple idea. The fact that you can change your life with football and the kind of challenges that they face in life are huge. And if you would try to solve them in a different way, they wouldn’t get solved! If you were to go and tell their parents, “You must put your children in school, you must let them work, you must make them equal to girls and boys”, it will never happen. So I think it’s an instrument that has brought about a lot of change and I could not go into more detail, but all of these girls have an amazing story.

 

You started the book with a touching description of the women in your family in the author’s note. Why did you do this?

Well, the author’s note is supposed to be something personal and in all my books, I relate it to something that I’ve experienced or known. I was just thinking that just 50 years ago, the life of a woman was so different. Suddenly in the course of my grandmother and mother’s generations, women have achieved so much and they have so many opportunities. Of course even the women of older times were strong in their own way and that’s what I wanted to convey. They really commanded a lot more respect and their word was something to be followed in the house. I don’t think, today, any mother can say, “My child listens to me all the time.” So you take some and you give some. We have progressed in many ways but the centrality of the mother to the home is no longer there. 

One can detect a shift in your writing from business-oriented topics to social issues and more personal stories. Would you agree with this?

When I first started writing Stay Hungry Stay Foolish, it was a very new concept. It was path-breaking in the sense that no one had ever written stories about people like us getting into business. We used to read about the Tatas, Birlas and Ambanis, but not about people who were from a middle-class background starting a business with no godfather or money. Now the start-up trend has gone viral and there are a million such stories. So I’m still interested in start-ups. But I’ve broadened it to feel that entrepreneurship is not just about a business. It really is just about the act of creating your own destiny and business is one way of doing this. Everyone doesn’t want to start and grow a big business but whoever you are, you could have an entrepreneurial mindset, which means that you think about how to solve problems. It’s suited to certain kind of people and the vast majority of people would be working for somebody else. But that doesn’t mean they have to go to work like robots and will not have any power to impact the world. So I think the bigger problems in our country are social problems. But it’s just about the subject attracting you because you have to spend so much of your time to write a book, so you do something that’s more interesting to you. I will be still writing on start-ups but it is not that I have to just do that, right? I started writing inspiring stories of entrepreneurs, inspiring real-life stories and that can go in many different directions. And, maybe, some day, it can go into fiction also. 

You have written nine books within a span of 10 years and most of your books are non-fiction research-based stories. How do you keep the momentum going?

Actually, I feel I could have done much more! When people tell me I have written a lot, I feel like I could have easily done five more books. I think the inspiration comes from the readers. I meet people who say that my books have inspired them to start a business or do something different in their lives. So that’s what keeps me going. Right now, I’m staying in an Airbnb and the host came and met me and said she was inspired by one of my books. I don’t know her at all but it was really wonderful to hear that. And secondly, the stories themselves inspire. They are often so interesting and inspiring that I feel that they should be shared with the world.

Text: Rushati Mukherjee

Picture: Rashbehari Das