On being the older woman in the room, this Women's Day

I have learnt from the women around me – my grandmothers, my aunts, my senior colleagues and friends. Today, as the older woman in the board room, the powder room and the drawing room, I want to tell the younger lot a simple mantra that I was not taught and in fact taught exactly the opposite. It is to get off the carousel that insists you need to impress. Please do not marinate yourself for hours in your own juices and crisp your skin for it to crackle under someone’s teeth. If you have been told that every outfit you wear needs to be matched, every document has to be made in fonts nobody has seen and every meal a little too fancy, please unlearn immediately. Reboot your system to being okay with letting go of perfection. Wear yourself lightly. Make an honest attempt, for yourself than from the need to impress others.

Every presentation I sit at, every college event, every conference, every panel discussion and every home I go to, one thing is clear-- that it is the women who make the extra effort. To impress, in the most performative manner by lavishing emotions, resources and time. Kick ass presentations in kitten heels, saris draped to perfection, skin glowing with strobe cream and still worrying it is not enough. Every festival spread is but the fruit of a woman’s labour, with napkins finished with a ring and tomatoes carved into rosettes. But it is also the women around us, who serve the quickest reminders of our flaws, who stare at an unthreaded eyebrow or voice poshly, why didn’t you make a salad? It is us women, who notice what is not done.

The casualty here is that we miss the bigger picture in between sweating the small stuff. To relax, to rest, pursue a hobby and feel less guilty for things you are not even responsible for. Patriarchy and misogyny, for instance. It will insist that you are not enough and so ‘lift’ your cheeks with contour, ‘conceal’ under the eyes and ‘hide’ spots. The proliferation of make-up brands in India has something to do with the rising insecurity and unrealistic beauty standards goaded by social media. When we get a meeting date, we also have to factor in when we will wash our hair so that it is not flat on D-day. On the day, twenty minutes I can use to iron out the spreadsheet is but taken by my frizzy hair that needs to be tamed and run through gadgets, which make them fall in soft waves that do not rock the ship of The Feminine mystique.

We have internalised the “superwoman” template a tad too seriously, but there is only so much time, energy and headspace for a human being. Working women chopping vegetables in Mumbai local on their way back from office is the stuff supermoms are made of. The pictures of women in their offices with kids sleeping on sofas are not examples of empowerment but institutional failure.

The lady stenographer who works with me walked into office an hour late on the day AI summit was inaugurated in Delhi, almost in tears, with guilt that she ‘failed’ in her duties. Her male counterpart, walked in blaming the traffic snarls and logistics. Women are the quickest to take the blame and over-explain.

As the older woman on the other side of the table, I am going to cut a lot of slack for the women around me. I am not going to ask anyone why her dupatta is not matching or why she did not wear kajal. Interruptions by children are a given. The liberty I have with other women, because we are both ‘F’ in gender category in every application form, is not to comment on her acne or when she is going to have children.

As the older woman in the room, I want to tell the girls that there is no moral desert and that life is not fair at all. That people walk away with the prize assignment because they knew the right person in the chain at the right time. It could be a less deserving man more often, but also a less deserving woman. There is only so much you can control, and hence, control what is within you-- your mind. Office politics is real. Family hierarchies foisted on patriarchy breed more cliques than anywhere else. Stay grounded and calm, and, trust me, it is a matter of mind training. Snapping back, oversharing, venting out-- not all need to be privy to your vulnerability.

While old boys club is a thing, I am yet to hear of an equivalent counterpart. And the old boys club in 2026 is more a thing of shame and embarrassment driving the world to war, unbridled greed and sex offences. We need more women in institutional leadership roles. We need to relax and stay focused on our goals for it, not over-explaining, not apologetic, not trying too hard to be everything and disengaging the minute disrespect is served. As the older woman in the room, I want to build a sorority and I know that is not going to happen by calling each other badass, bitch and diva in a fit of pop culture feminism. I am not going to say cry, have coffee, but put on the lipstick and fix it. I am going to let them into what I have learnt, so that they don’t have to live in the same fallacies. To whosoever cares to listen, that is. For I also realise that not all women are feminists and that my feminism needn’t work for you.