| I want to hug this guy. Like, really. Buy me a airplane ticket. Arunachalam Muruganantham is a hero. I use that word in its full magnitude. Since I am now an expert on the matter, having read the entire article, I'll speculate on what motivates this man: - Grit. Crazy amounts of grit. The article is full of good quotes, but my favorite is what he said after being abandoned by his mother: "It was a problem for me," he says. "I had to cook my own food." - Humility combined with hunger: "Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future." "Every time he comes to know something new, he wants to know everything about it," [his wife] says. - Love of humanity, on some level at least: "Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty - everything happens because of ignorance." As an aside, I LOVE the picture of his wife and daughter toward the end. This one photograph lends better context to the story than all the others combined. I know a single picture means nothing, but the look in his daughter's eyes makes me think she'll inherit something of her dad's baddassness. And as another aside, bloody god-damn fucking hell, are the following bits really true? There are still many taboos around menstruation in India. Women can't visit temples or public places, they're not allowed to cook or touch the water supply - essentially they are considered untouchable. There are also myths and fears surrounding the use of sanitary pads - that women who use them will go blind, for example, or will never get married. |
Such myths abound globally, especially in rural environments. Worse myths exist around tampons--that a woman who uses a tampon is no longer a virgin. The implications of this in more rural societies are staggering, as young women can lose marital prospects or even be killed.
What impressed me most about his work was the lengths he went to in order to understand the problems the women were facing. That "football uterus" made him an outcast and he was rejected, which is not wholly unlike how menstrual women were treated in his village. He really got the full "customer" experience.
His work will also greatly help those women who have severe menstrual bleeding problems, in which they bleed non-stop for weeks (or months or, sadly, years) at a time. Not only are they outcasts in their communities, but even children will pelt them with rocks. It's profoundly sad.
It might sound trite, but we hear about the man who built the Taj Mahal for his beloved wife. Look at how much he is revered! Now consider what this man has done out of love for his wife--he has far eclipsed even that magnificent structure.