Weekend Exclusive | Sudha Menon, author of "Leading Ladies' unplugged & unleashed!

"Leading Ladies: Women Who Inspire India' is a collection of 15 successful women who have gone out of their way and made a difference to society. Sudha Menon, with an experience of two decades as a journalist and feature writer has made an effort to bring together unique and unusual life journeys of these path breakers' and trend setters' as an inspirational treasure. Rather than typically talking about their success stories the book speaks more about their personal lives and gives an insight of their core spark of passion, courage and conviction. Adgully brings you an exclusive interaction with the maker of "Leading Ladies', Sudha Menon sharing her personal voyage throughout the process of this book.

When asked about her inspiration towards writing, Sudha said, "I have always had a fascination with the written word, having grown up in a house where books were like religion. I grew up reading everything that I could lay my hands on and that included the newspapers, comics, P.G.Wodehouse, A.J.Cronin, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Emile Zola. So journalism was a natural progression."

About three years ago she started dabbling in non- journalistic writing. She says, " It was stories about people and places and long-forgotten memories that often tantalize you with their short appearances on the radar of your immediate, present memory."

Sharing her thoughts over her inspiration for this collection she told us, "I think writing this book was the natural progression of my life as a journalist, especially a business journalist. In 22 years, I have met more than my share of talented, bright, accomplished women and each time I met one, I would put a reminder in my head to come back and find out more about their journey to becoming the near-perfect beings that they seem to be."

She added, "I have been fascinated not just as a journalist but also as a mother who has walked the tightrope walk for years, balancing my need to try and bring up a child (she is now a splendid young woman who makes me immeasurably proud) as best as I could, with the demands of a career I am passionate about. I knew each of these women have all of these demands on their time too and I just had to learn how they coped and came out on the top of pile, at all times!"

She believes, " there are so many untold stories of women who can provide all of us with so much hope and I have found my calling in just discovering them and telling them to the world."

But at the same time she agrees that, Selecting the woman who are featured in Leading Ladies was more difficult than she ever thought it would be because even an initial list of possible women who could feature in the book ran up to around 100. She said, "I don't even think I would have even skimmed the surface of the thousands of women who are inspirational in our country, with that list of 100."

In her views, life as a woman journalist in the nineties was more or less a cake walk. Sudha further added, "My personal opinion is that people are always eager to help, if you can just ask for help. No point sitting on a high horse and pretending you know everything. I can't say I suffered from being a woman reporter. Later I shifted to business journalism which was great too. No gender bias, no discrimination, it was largely a meritocracy in every organization I worked for and I am glad it was that way."

While sharing her touching experience during the conversations with these ladies she said, "Getting them to open up was not difficult. The first hour or so is a bit tough because that is when they gauge you and try to figure out your trustworthiness and also your ability to put down their thoughts as they mean it to be conveyed. Once they were convinced that I was not looking to sensationalize their stories, they were more than willing to tell me their stories, fears, dreams....

She added, "I think women bond at a very different level when they talk and most of the times the interviews were not even like formal interviews. They were more reminiscences and lots of nostalgia, some teary-eyed moments (on both sides) about some long-forgotten incident and just exchange of information about families, parents , kids, spouses, growing up pains.... In the end what I came back with was a fascinating collage, a vivid, colorful canvas that the women themselves painted."

In order to collect these real life stories she started writing to them and meeting them. She said, "Interestingly, a couple of my subjects were not very keen to be written about in a book of this kind because they did not believe that they had done enough to be in such a book but once they were convinced that an inspirational book could be of use to thousands of other women, they said they would do it and then, they were generous with their time and commitment to my project. In fact, they all adopted it, with great generosity of spirit."

But she told us that most of the women in the first volume actually wrote themselves into the book with their unique qualities and profiles.

Leading Ladies includes stories of strong women like P.T. Usha, the girl from a tiny village in Kerala who had nothing to encourage her but her own will and nobody to compete with but the express train that sped past her village, Shaheen Mistri, the girl who gave up a privileged life in the United States to come here and spend time with slum kids and change their lives by giving them high-quality education and many such torch bearers.

It was tough and so I decided I would have to do multiple volumes of the book. By next year I plan to have a second volume." | Manjiri Pupala [manjiri(at)adgully.com]