Pad Man
发布于: 6年前 2'0" 152wpm
So Pad Man is a movie, which is based on a true story - it's Muruganantham Arunachalam's story, who is the inventor of the low-cost, sanitary pad-making machine. And I thought the story was incredibly gripping because he was a man, who was not very educated. He encountered a problem. He saw his wife using rags, which he said were so dirty that he would not even clean his bicycle with them. They could not afford commercial sanitary pads, so he decided to make a low-cost sanitary pad.
“Women strong, mother strong, sister strong, then country strong.”
So when I started doing research - you know, I was doing a column for The Times of India, and at that point, I felt that it was a problem that was primarily Indian, where 23 per cent of Indian women are using sanitary pads and tampons and the rest are not. Which means that they're using rags and leaves and sometimes ash. This leads to three different ramifications.
One is disease: you have fungal infections, so you have reproductive tract infections, you have links to cervical cancer, infertility. The second is we talk about empowering women and then we realized in our research that 20 per cent of schoolgirls drop out once they begin menstruating. So that, again, holds them back. And the third is the shame and taboo around it - where it's just a natural part of our biology. In fact, it's the most important part of our biology because without that, our species would be extinct.
I don't know if my work will change things, but I do know that if everyone gives a little bit, inch by inch, we will change. We will change our mindset. And it might take a generation but we all have to try, don't we?
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