A leap back in time - stories from my school days

Before I get to the main topic, the lady I referred to in my previous post came to work today in a beautiful dress for the first time!!! Alright, at least I provided some inspiration to cheer up the workplace a bit with some girly eye candy.

Now, coming to the topic of this post - I met my music group last night. One of the nice things about this group is we always end up talking about fun non-music related stuff (what do you expect when you put seven girls in a room?). And yesterday it was about - our school days. I had written this up a few months ago when I had taken time off from work and remembered it after this conversation. Thought I'd put it up here.

I went to an all girls’ school, in Secunderabad, India. It was a grey building – everything was grey, inside and out and it bore an uncanny resemblance to a jail. The school was run by a group of Roman Catholic nuns with an iron hand. The administrators tried very hard to instill discipline, piety, and moral values in us (we had a mandatory class called Moral Science every week). They also tried to make us well rounded by having classes such as S. U. P. W. (Socially useful productive work, dubbed by many of the girls as Socially Un-Productive Work), language classes (Sanskrit or Telugu) and sports (Sanskrit was almost extinct even in those days and most of it was taught in English).

One thing engraved in my memory is the dress code in school, a code that was stricter than that enforced by the Army. This code was particularly enforced during the so called sports period. Starting from your hair to your shoes, everything had to be just so, or else you could expect to participate in a barbecue – your own. For straying from the dress code implied spending an hour roasting under the merciless Secunderabad heat on bare knees watching other girls frolic. The most complicated aspect was the hair. The luckiest girls were the ones with very short hair for they did not have to bother about it at all. If you had hair that was between 12 and 15 inches in length, you were expected to tie it up in two pony tails, and God forbid if a single strand went astray. If your hair was between 15 and 20 inches, you were expected to wear two plaits with black ribbons to hold the ends. If your hair was over 20 inches long, you were expected to wear two plaits with one important condition: the plaits had to form a perfect U, and again God forbid if a single strand went astray.
Next was the uniform inspection. We wore a white shirt and a skort like pleated skirt in navy blue. The shirt had to be blindingly white. And (this is my pet peeve and always got me into trouble) everyone had to wear a tie. Yes, you heard right – a tie. Imagine hundreds of girls wearing ties in scorching 40 plus heat playing basketball, baseball etc. I still get shivers thinking about that thing. It was like a rope around my neck always threatening me – you do one thing wrong and you will be strangled.
Then the accessories: all the girls had to wear their house badge – no excuses for forgetting your badge. But the piece de resistance was the shoes. Shoes had to be polished white with liquid white polish. The tiniest speck of dirt resulted in barbecuing. There were some naive girls who put their enterprising skills to work and "polished" their shoes with chalk. Boy, did they get into trouble! The last thing that was inspected was nails (thankfully only finger nails). Thank God for teeth that could be put to good use when we forgot to trim our nails.

Despite its scary appearance the school was one of the most prestigious and popular schools in the city, particularly with the boys. It was the school where upper middle class and rich girls and wannabe fashionistas went. I loved going to school – it was my escape in to a world filled with exciting characters. I was surrounded by girls from vastly different backgrounds than my own – they spoke different languages, they ate different food, they had completely different lifestyles than my own. And some of them were extremely intelligent. I had this one friend who had pondered the concept of God and the origin of the Universe at the age of 11. We once had a conversation that went something like this:
P: I don’t believe that there is a God.
Me: Then how can you explain your existence?
P: My birth can be explained by science.
Me: (guessing where this was heading) OK, how do you explain the origin of all living species?
P: They came from dust.
Me: How did the dust come to being?
P: It just did.

I was somewhat unsure about whether or not I believed in God. My mother was moderately religious while my father was not. The closest I had come to divinity was when I watched the movie Ben-Hur. After this conversation, I felt a bit awed. How did living matter come from dust? And come to think of it, I had no idea how my birth could be explained by science. During this time, I went to a cousin’s wedding. During the train ride from Secunderabad to Madras, I had come up with a theory on how I could have got out of my mother’s tummy – doctor cuts it open and fishes me out. However, I was still very confused about how my cat had given birth without having visited a vet. As it happened, there were a couple of older boys at the wedding that I became friends with and one evening the conversation meandered to just this topic. I was introduced to the theory of the birds and the bees by teenage boys who were kind of amused at my innocence. I was mortified and spent the rest of the evening going to great lengths to avoid them.

More tales to follow - this time I mean it as I have already written them down.

To wear a skirt to work or not? Tales of a woman in a male dominated profession Part 2

After grad school, I did a stint as a post doc with a woman. It was a great experience to be in the company of a woman who was not only an accomplished scientist but looked gorgeous and was not afraid to dress like a girl on occasion. Coming from a lab full of males to a lab dominated by women was a sea change. Whereas as a grad student I had to learn many things on my own (I did have one awesome mentor after I'd spent a couple of years in the lab), deal with not so friendly lab mates a tough boss and a lab that looked like a twister had hit a tinkerer's garage, as a post-doc I entered a well organized lab where things shone. Black laser light shielding curtains hung from pretty shower curtain hooks. The girls in the lab hung out and actually helped each other. I was like wow!

After this, I came to an enineering company - ruled by men for the most part who had well established their individual territories. The company has less than 10% women in engineering roles. When I first started the job, I was too busy learning the job and learning how to do the working mommy - baby balancing act to have any energy left over to process what it meant to be in a male dominated environment. However, with the passing years, a few things started to get my attention. One of them was clothes. I like wearing girly clothes - you know skirts etc. Nothing flamboyant, just regular old skirts. One of the women I know who has been in this industry a very long time once told me that she never had the guts to wear anything but pants because she was sure nobody would take her seriously if she wore girly clothes. I was flummoxed - the thought had never occured to me. (I mean nobody would take me for a bimbo even if I wore a dress - I do not even remotely look like one, right?). But after I had this conversation, I began to feel a bit self conscious. Very often, I am the only woman in a room full of men of all sizes, ages, and races, and wearing a nice girly dress, pretty earrings - would that be distracting? But once that thought occured to me, I got impatient with myself for even thinking it. I mean, don't I have enough on my plate already without adding what men at work think about how I dress to it? Let's face it, the human species (like perhaps most species) exists to flaunt it's good stuff, gratify it's ego in whatever ways it can.

Do you choose your work or does it choose you? Tales of a woman in a male dominated profession - Part 1

I am a scientist and ever since my grad school days, have been the only woman, or one of a handful of women in the type of work I do. (A notable exception was my stint as a post-doc when I worked for a woman who led a woman dominated lab). When I started grad school in a laser spectroscopy lab, a brand new foreign student who had never seen a laser ever, much less interacted with amazing Russian scientists you only read about, I was intimidated to unbearable levels. Now, I'm not someone that is easily intimidated. So when I chose the lab I did to embark upon my career in Science, I wondered if I'd made the right decision - you know - how on earth was I going to survive in such an environment? But that was part of the thrill - the advisor was revered an in his field, the lab was full of some amazing male brain (brawn - hmmmm a bit disappointing there), and there was cool equipment everywere. This was science geek paradise. If I can claim that I pushed the envelope a bit in my life, this was certainly one of those times. As it turned out, I did have a hard life - my advisor ruled with an iron hand and treated me just the same as the big Russian guys - he hung me on a rope and verbally made mincemeat out of me every time I screwed up or didn't meet his stringent intellectual standards. Earning his respect was a big deal for me and anytime I was made mincemeat of was excruciatingly painful. I just didn't have the thick hide my colleagues did to not care - I cared about his opinion of me deeply. Female vs. male response? After a couple of such episodes, I convinced myself that he did not think much of me and I went on a passionate mission to prove myself. The result was that I aced one of his courses (topped it - I did better than all those Russian brains). I was overjoyed - not only because I topped the course but because my advisor bothered to come and give me this information and for the very first time told me that he thought I was doing good work. Imagine that? I was like what??? You think so? That's when I realized he was my champion. To this day, he has only wonderful things to say about me when I ask for references and he is one of the very few champions I have had in my career.

The long and short of this story is that I am beginning to realize that my biggest vulnerability is this need to be appreciated. Is this a woman problem in general? Throw into this mix decisions on what to wear to work, interacting with male colleagues etc., there's never a dull moment. Part 2 to follow.

My remorseful heart aches from the knowledge
That yours was hurt more than I will know
My heart is weary from fighting battles
That threaten to make memories flow
My heart is frustrated with my mind
That does not let it speak or let it go
My heart fails to understand why
It must suffer in silence, helpless and low.

My anxious heart asks if you're happy
It hangs its head that it does not know
My heart trembles to ask that simple question
How are you? Why is it frightened so?
My heart wants to scream out loud
That the hand that held it, made it glow
Still gives warmth and joy, support and strength
My heart wants to speak when the mind says no.