of things I want to double click on first is an observation that first struck me when I did an episode with Kavita Ravan lady doctors her book is called lady doctors about women who became doctors in the 19th century gives me goosebumps to think about some of those stories and one of the things I realize while reading that is that if you were a man who became a doctor in the 19th century in India it was largely a question of luck and privilege and right place right time and all of that it didn't mean you anything outstanding if you were a woman who became a doctor in 19th century India it doesn't matter how lucky you got the bottom line is you are extraordinary just by dint of making it that far you were extraordinary period and I'm connecting this to something that we were talking about before the episode began and something that I've explored with various feminists who have come on the show about how it is the easy way out is to learn feminism by just reading books and you know which are written by white authors American authors you read about what's happening there you adopt those frames and all of that but that's a necessarily simplistic understanding if you're in India you have to place yourself within the lived realities and the constraints and circumstances of Indian women the constraints of space place the constraints of time all of those constraints and then see where it takes you and one phrase I don't remember which of us came up with it but one phrase that came up in an episode I did with Mukuleka Banerjee was lift feminism she was talking about a mother who sounds just like your mother and if you just look at the bare biographical details there are a lot of things which don't seem particularly spectacular you know if you look at it from a 21st century point of view but in that time like you know taking a Tonga and going from one city to the other which I think a mother did with a couple of female friends and stuff like that in that time you are you know broadly not you can't throw away certain constraints but within that you are doing all that you can in so can you tell me a little bit about this obviously in your mother's context but also other contexts through your life of the different kind of lived feminism that often go unseen

yeah which is why I think the discussion we had before we started recording when I was telling you that we can't just adopt feminist theory just because it sounds so glorious in those pages the lived feminism is the actual real day to day gritty realities of how we are negotiating that space within the system that we've been given is the actual strength of that individual and I'm saying the word individual because I mean it in that sense and not as gender defining and in my mother's case specifically hers is a very interesting story she grew up in the Philippines her father was a businessman fairy cushy life beautiful house you call the I mean whatever kind of artifacts and everything looks so luxurious and then he was involved with the Subhashantribos's movement by trusted man and one fine day he didn't come back home when the Jabs attacked Philippines and my nanny who was all of four feet five inches or something or maybe less and I found that time and so many children so true of my uncles and three or four of these sisters she made them just wear chuppers and made them put on like layers of clothes you know that's what my mom told me and they ran in the darkness in the fields to escape the Jabs and everything reached a safe space without mobile phones without whatever my nanny managed to contact her brother who was in Chautau and this was around the time when partition was happening here and they managed to kind of make it to India landed up in Chautau mommy was always very inclined towards medicine so they kind of she took admission into a total medical college and before that they were studying in some other college where she met dad so that's how their love story began and he was a real hero I'm told you know he was very well turned out dressed very very you know rose nice shirt and all of that but didn't come from a very privileged background by the way even if I'm making him sound like that but that's how their love affair grew and she was like a hundred percenter in all her subjects like if she got half a mark less it would be a matter of like defeat and this was not instilled by any parental pressure this was just herself and then she moved to Japot did her medicine here they got married lived separately in the whole in-law space where there were three elder brothers to my three other brothers to my father and their wives who were not educated in the beginning they all did their MAs after they got married and had children but mommy was the only professional working woman married into a family where my grandmother was the ruling matriarch and very conservative key so that kind of true truth used to happen in that household but mommy took a