Rider Of The Surf

The unique experiences of a woman in a man's world can make for captivatingtelling, with great stories of wanderlust, war and more recently, corporatesuccess. From Freya Stark's remarkable travels over a century ago to CarlyFiorina's version of what really went on at H-P, there have been tales offulfilment, redemption, and most of all, of self-belief. Often there is incommon an element of struggle, sometimes against physical elements, but mostlyagainst simple prejudice, ignorance and general male disbelief.

The corporate world sometimes pays lip service to the idea of gendersensitivity, but remains an essentially macho boys' club. To take an egregiousexample, there are still far fewer female investment bankers than the number ofbright women graduating with specialisation in finance from the world's bestbusiness schools would suggest. Other fields, like sales, are considered justtoo gruelling for women. Sales is in any case a brutally demanding corporatefunction, not just because of the sheer legwork and long hours involved, butalso because doing it well usually involves convincing people you may have verylittle in common with to put up their cash for your products. Especially for themostly middle class graduates of India's best colleges and business schools, itis often the first encounter with a world for which little of their backgroundwill have prepared them. Two years ago, former Nestle manager Swati Kaushalentertainingly captured a sense of that weird world with her witty and acerbic Pieceof Cake. Manreet Sodhi Someshwar, who graduated from the Indian Institute ofManagement in Calcutta a year after Kaushal did, explores even more of thatterritory with Earning the Laundry Stripes, which is based on herexperiences as the first woman recruited by Hindustan Lever as a sales managerin two decades.

Hong Kong-based Sodhi writes regularly, both as a contributor to the SouthChina Morning Post and as an award-winning short story writer, and withparticular felicity and impact on the gender-related issues of role and powerthat confront Asian women caught between dramatically divergent cultural paths.That sensitivity informs what are easily the best parts of Laundry Stripes.

Her character Noor Bhalla's account of the male impediments to familyplanning among rural women is deadly accurate and should find resonance withanyone who has ever tried picking apart the patriarchal power imbalance thatmars much of Indian society. Equally, her analysis of whether women can succeedat sales, while borrowing a little too much from Feminism 101 (surely it's alittle naïve to think women have the monopoly on empathy, relationship-buildingand constructive networking, for instance), is perfectly valid from a managementstandpoint.

Alas, the editing jars—the book betrays an apparently random approach tothe use of the definite article. Elsewhere, a Hindustan Contessa ferrying Noorand a visiting manager from overseas morphs mysteriously into a Maruti Esteem inthe course of a Bombay downpour. I was a classmate of Sodhi's at IIM, and amperhaps better placed than most to say that these are errors unlikely to havebeen made by anyone as smart and motivated as she clearly was. Equally none ofthis is evident in her other writing. Less excusable, though, is the fact that LaundryStripes falls smack into the trap that most other IIM-lit does. It wastesearly chapters in alarmingly self-congratulatory appraisal of the IIM graduate—withouta hint of irony. Passing some exams, even astonishingly competitive ones, ornailing down the most prestigious and best-paid jobs on campus, do not make youa superhero. This is a pity, because it detracts from the rest of the book,which is about an intelligent, sensitive and determined person's quest forfulfilment and success against the odds. As far as living a life goes, that's arather bigger issue than acing tests.

A shorter version of this appeared in print.