She has witnessed her grandmother and mother take reins almost overnight of a cement business that her grandfather left behind. She’s never been afraid to take the road less traveled and explore non-traditional career trajectories. The guest on our show today is Neha Inamdar, who is the Director of Data Science & Analytics at Fresh Gravity. From a successful and a high flying career in management consulting to finding gratification working at non-profits, from living and working in the US to finding her home in Pune, she’s not the norm, but an exception.
Episode 20
30th January, 2023
Episode 20: Veena Hari
Born to a punjabi mother and a Tamilian dad, it was both fun and challenging to dabble between two cultures that could not be more different from each other. She fit in neither but she was both, she spoke neither languages, but people assumed she spoke both. In 7th grade she knew that she wanted to be a clinical psychologist. She defied norms in the decade when neither did she have any role models to look up to nor did she know what career path she would be on. The guest on the show today is Veena Hari, who talks about her career as a practitioner of Clinical Psychology. She’s worked across a breadth of issues like child sexual abuse, to maternal reproductive & mental health to postpartum anxiety & depression to running a support group for adults debating to remain childfree or not. She is the CEO and Founder of Bhavati foundation, a non-profit organization that provides accessible mental health services including awareness sessions, training, one-on-one counseling and sharing circles on the issues around reproductive mental health. Veena challenges the most commonly spread or misunderstood sentiment around motherhood, which is that women are biologically wired with maternal instincts. Veena explains the type of mental health challenges that can show up postpartum and how one can be aware of the triggers. Her simple and yet very powerful advice is that if you are experiencing more bad days than good, you need to get help. Her perspective on sharing the load with her partner and developing a journaling habit is very useful. Tune into the episode at “Just an Ordinary Mom” to hear Veena challenge conventional wisdom.
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Credits
Sound Engineer
Shrey Tiwari
Producer
Vedant Naik
Recording Studio
Manic Pod studio, Chembur
She’s not afraid to recall one of the most painful memories from her childhood of being bullied as a kindergartner. She has seen male allyship in action way before the term was even coined, watching her dad support her mom’s entrepreneurial pursuit. As a pre-teen she made trips to newspaper mandi’s at 4 am to negotiate pamphlet prices with the vendors. The guest on our show today is Nischala Agnihotri (Director of Marketing at Insightly Analytics) who loves to call herself a Story Scientist.
“My career has been a series of "foolishly brave moves' and when I look back, I wouldn't have it any other way”. These are the words of our guest today, Arundhati Kumar who is the founder and the creative force behind her sustainable accessories brand BEEJ. Born to a punjabi father and a bengali mother, she’s taken the calm of her dad and the grit & go-getter spirit of her mum. She is a dreamer, a dancer, a designer but more importantly, an achiever. Arundhati has spent 18 years working across industries as a senior HR professional with various Indian and Global organizations including ITC Hotels, ICICI Bank, Deutsche Bank, Condé Nast before she decided to make a career pivot by launching her own #sustainability brand. She lives by the theory of #onelifeliveit and has created the life she wanted for herself. She candidly shares how she had to fight the inner demons first as she decided to end her marriage before she could get her family to see her point of view. Her advice of separating the ‘parent’ from the ‘spouse’ in order to successfully raise children in a #coparenting arrangement is raw, vulnerable and comes straight from heart. Without really saying anything, she is raising a daughter who believes that she can achieve anything and everything.
Despite growing up in a progressive household where her parents, especially her mother did everything to make sure she received the best in class education & became financially independent, the awareness that “I am a girl” didn’t escape her after she reached a certain age. She seethed with anger when she was told she can’t do a certain thing because of her gender. Thankfully, her response was not compliance, in fact it was just the opposite. She did things because she was told it was hard for girls to do them. The guest on our show today is Sudha Ranganathan, Director of Product Marketing at LinkedIn.
We only realize it much later that our parents were human beings too who were merely playing the role of a mother or a father, struggling to give us their very best. In the conversation today, Aarthi talks fondly about her mother, who was the force beneath her wings, fiercely prodding her to become financially independent.
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