Miniya Chatterji has just moved with her three-month-old to Goa to escape from the pollution. Some of her friends, she casually mentions, are Sanjay Garg, the designer of Raw Mango and William Dalrymple. She has worked with the World Economic Forum, travelled across continents and by her own admission doesn't wear trousers. Chatterji, walks into Perch, a coffee and wine bar in Khan Market, a poster girl for the affluent Indian cocooned from the real world outside. Her book, Indian Instincts: Essays on Freedom and Equality in India which looks at growth, development and democracy through a series of personal essays, is then almost an act of rebellion.
Moving—packed with data—and oddly philosophical—she hopes that it will get people out of their bubble. “We have made these institutions. We haven't stopped to think whether these institutions are really working for us? We are trapped in our creation,'' she says. “We have not stopped to see how this stuff is changing my life. There is chaos around us. We need to reflect and introspect.''
Chatterji was the chief sustainability officer for Jindal Steel and Power Group. She has recently quit her job to start her own firm. Her background is finance—she writes for all the right publications, and has worked with the World Economic Forum, and Goldman Sachs in London and the issues of facts, numbers and figures with the practiced ease of a hard-nosed economics person. But it's more than facts; it is aspects of her own life that she weaves in that makes these essays worth reading. She offers a view of modern India, addresses issues like toilets, love, sex, religion, talks about Muslim exclusion and education, gender and corruption.
It is glimpses into the characters that she meets—the Devadasi child who wants to study, ordinary people on the street in Kolkata who don't want to go to serve in Missionaries of Charity that make her book fascinating. “I would like to expand the notion of freedom from just the aspect of independence,'' she says. Her own courtship finds its way into the book, as does her pregnancy. It was maternity leave that finally compelled her to write the book. She was working with Jindal and was asked to take the last two months off because she was pregnant. Chatterji, however, felt she could work till the end. In the tussle that followed, she discovered another aspect of being free that is restricted by society. “It was just another aspect that was messy and problematic,'' she says.
And yet, writing about it, and getting people to print it, wasn't easy. “It was on the softer subjects that I found people were not so keen to publish my article,'' she says. It is this personal aspect that gets lost in the public that she wants to reclaim. “Change happens when you think of our own self,'' she says rather philosophically. “You have to prioritise your own life.”