Scaling the Peaks

There are women in all fields who have achieved successes that can be termed exceptional. These were mostly achieved despite their status as women. Here, Nazim Khan profiles eight achievers who, in their own way and their own fields, are inspirations to all women.

Indra Nooyi

Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi can tell you a thing or two about breaking glass ceilings. She let nothing stand in her way to becoming the head of PepsiCo, the fourth-largest food and beverage company in the world. Nooyi is indeed an inspiration to all Indian women, indeed, to all women worldwide.

But her list of achievements doesn’t end at being head of PepsiCo. In 2006, Fortune magazine ranked Nooyi No. 1 in its list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business. The same year, Forbes magazine ranked her the fourth most powerful woman on earth, after Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany), Condoleezza Rice (US Secretary of State) and Wu Yi (Vice-Premier of China).

Nooyi certainly wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth. After graduating from Chennai, she went on to acquire degrees from IIM Calcutta and the Yale School of Management. She began her career at Boston Consulting Group, a management consulting firm, and went on to hold senior positions in companies such as Motorola and Asea Brown Boveri. She later joined PepsiCo and swiftly rose through the ranks to become its CEO in August last year.

At PepsiCo, Nooyi was instrumental in spinning off fast-food restaurants KFC and Pizza Hut in 1997 to create a separate company called Yum Brands. She has been also been responsible for charting the way for PepsiCo’s acquisition of Tropicana.

Nooyi has never lost sight of her Indian roots and values. She learnt the hard way that it’s best not to hide what you are when she went for her first interview in an ill-fitting business suit and was turned down for the job. She wore a sari for the next interview and was selected. Today, Nooyi is seen at most Pepsi functions in a sari.

Sania Mirza

Sania Mirza has ventured where no Indian woman had gone before. She planted herself firmly in the annals of Indian sporting history when she became the first Indian woman to win a WTA singles title at the Hyderabad Open in 2005. The same year, she also became the first Indian woman to reach the fourth round of a Grand Slam Tournament at the US Open. Today, Sania is among the Top 50 woman tennis players in the world - yet another first for an Indian woman.

Sania had an early start in competitive tennis, picking up a tennis racquet at the age of six. She turned pro at the tender age of 13, and hasn’t looked back since.

Sania is the ultimate poster girl of the Indian media. She is admired for daring to be different, wearing her attitude on her sleeve. She’s often seen in T-shirts with lines that say “I’m cute, no shit”, “Well-behaved women rarely make history”, and “You either agree with me or you’re wrong”.

Of course, like most people in the public eye, Sania has also been in the middle of controversies; her remarks on pre-marital sex created a bit of a stir, and she found herself at the receiving end of a fatwa by Islamic cleric for her `skimpy’ tennis attire.

Critics have raised question marks about her fitness, which they say has triggered her current slump in form. And some say her aggressive attitude borders on arrogance. But it’s perhaps her aggressiveness that has played an important role in her success, and as for her slump in form, it should not be long before she proves her critics wrong.

Her greatest inspiration, she says, is when a girl comes to her and says “I picked up a tennis racquet because of you”. She’s certainly an inspiration for any Indian girl.

Saina Nehwal

First came Sania, then there was Saina. Apart from her name, the teenage sensation has much in common with Sania, including a huge appetite for success and the belief that she can beat the best in business. While Sania made Indian tennis history, Saina Nehwal has taken the badminton world by storm.

The 16-year-old made an appearance at the Philippines Open in May 2006 as an unseeded player and a world ranking of 86, and went on to beat everyone in sight to take the women’s singles title. With the victory, Saina became the first Indian woman to win a four-star badminton event, and it took her world ranking to 45. Since then, she has managed a career-best world ranking of 22.

Regarded as the best thing to have happened to the world of Indian badminton after Aparna Popat, Saina was trained by Dronacharya Award winner S M Arif and later by all-England winner Pulella Gopichand, The teenager hopes to win an Olympic Gold some day. And the way she’s been going, her dream may not remain just a dream.

Shilpa Shetty

It was a blessing in disguise! Shilpa Shetty’s Bollywood career was in the doldrums when she got an invitation to participate in the UK reality show Celebrity Big Brother. Little did she realise that she would land herself in the middle of a raging controversy, be at the centre of international attention, and emerge a winner.

The trouble began when Shilpa became the target of what were perceived as racial attacks and barbs by some of the other participants on the show, particularly Jade Goody. It wasn’t long before the press got on to the act and it became a Shilpa show all the way – in the newspapers, the tabloids and TV. So heated did the debate become that it was even thought fit to be discussed in the House of Commons and the Indian Parliament.

Shilpa not only weathered the storm well, but went on to ride the wave of public sentiment in her favour to win the show hands down. She’s been invited to dinner with Queen Elizabeth and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. And there are reports of her having bagging several lucrative deals, including one for a perfume named after her, and a role in a James Bond movie!

Kiran Desai

Following in your mother’s footsteps is a difficult task, especially when your mother is the acclaimed novelist Anita Desai. But Kiran Desai took that route and managed go a step further when she won the Man Booker prize in 2006, something her mother could never do, even though she was nominated three times for the award.

Kiran Desai won the Booker for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss, becoming the youngest-ever woman writer to have won it (at the age of 35), and the second Indian author after Arundhati Roy.

Desai’s came out with her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, in 1998 for which she earned plaudits from many, including Salman Rushdie.

The Inheritance of Loss is based on a character who has to face a drastic change of cultures when he migrates from Kalimpong in Northeastern India to the US. Kiran herself was brought up in India and left at the age of 14. The plot is partly reminiscent of her own story, and beautifully describes the struggles of such cross-cultural journeys.

Ekta Kapoor

Love her or hate her, but you cannot ignore Ekta Kapoor. While the feminists hate her for producing soaps that they claim degrades the status of women, this doesn’t cut much ice with most Indian families, who are absolutely lapping up her productions. So popular are her serials (all of which start with the letter K) that Ekta is now known as the Soap Queen of India.

And she deserves that title. She has produced over 50 soap operas that air across major Indian networks. Her influence in the Indian media is undeniable. She was named among the 40 Young Global Leaders 2006 by the Forum of Young Global Leaders, an affiliate of the World Economic Forum. In 2001, Asiaweek magazine named her among the 50 most influential communicators in Asia. In the same year, she won the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year award, the first woman to receive the honour.

The daughter of yesteryear actor Jeetendra, films run in Ekta’s veins. She’s also a film producer, and has released five films to date, of which Kya Kool Hai Hum was the most successful. A sequel to it is being planned.

Ekta has often been the target of criticism for tackling themes like infidelity and divorce, using rehashed and repetitive plots and stories that seem to drag on and on. But the channel heads don’t seem to mind, for her serials still manage to keep the audiences tuned in and the TRPs going.

Deepa Mehta

She’s in the news for varied reasons, right or wrong, depending on which way you look at it. Some people feel she is someone who deliberately makes films that show India in a bad light and makes money from it. Others laud her for tackling subjects that were not touched upon hitherto.

The subjects of Deepa Mehta’s films are certainly controversial. In Fire, she took on the issue of women involved in a lesbian relationship, and 1947: Earth dealt with the carnage in the wake of India’s partition. Her latest movie in the trilogy, Water, depicts the plight of Indian widows a few decades ago. Water was short-listed for Oscars in the Best Foreign Film Category but eventually lost out to The Lives of Others.

Mehta showed true grit when she was forced to abandon shooting for Water in India after Hindu fundamentalists ransacked the sets and threatened her. Refusing to abandon her project, she then shot the film again in Sri Lanka with a new cast.

Deepa Mehta was born in Amritsar and has worn many filmmaking hats (she started off with doing sound, then editing, and later moved to writing and direction). She is currently making a film on the plight of Indian immigrants in Canada in the early 20th century. In the book Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, film-maker Jacqueline Levitin described her as "Canada's most internationally renowned woman film-maker".

Sunita Williams

Sunita Williams made history when she became the second woman of Indian origin after Kalpana Chawla to walk in space.

It was the culmination of a long journey for Sunita after being selected by NASA in June 1998 for a space mission as a flight engineer on the International Space Station. After six years of training, Sunita took off on the space shuttle Discovery on December 9, 2006 and is scheduled to be in space for about 6 months.

Sunita started off her career as a helicopters and aeroplane pilot, and applied to NASA after logging in 2,770 hours in the cockpits of as many as 30 different aircraft.

Born to a Gujarati father, Dr Deepak Pandya (a famous Neuroanatomist) and Bonnie, of Yugoslavian descent, Sunita is proud of her Indian roots. She took along with her an idol of Ganesha, a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and samosas to eat in space. An animal lover, Sunita says she would have been a veterinarian if she hadn’t become an astronaut.