Meandering Through Exclusion On A Quest To Include

Our encounters with exclusion begin early in life and they form sediments within us only to float back up from time to time. Raised in a family with my parents, my sister Kavitha, who was born five years before me, and my three cousins - Preethi, Mohan, and Preetham, our household was imbued with the frenzied energy of five young children. If you observe children, they learn the principles of forming groups very early on. If you don’t trust me, look closely at them the next time you visit a children’s park and the in-group dynamics will become quite clear. Here’s some food for thought on how this is observed in children as young as three years old. 

Kavi and Preethi bonded well, having conversations and playing games that I wasn’t a part of. Mohan and Preetham, being boys, had their own games which didn’t permit an ignored middle child’s participation, probably because I was quite puny for the most part of my school-going years, so much so that it was difficult to buy readymade clothes for me. It wasn’t that I never tried to be a part of their games, it was just that my desire to be included ended up with the kind of violence that you can expect from little children. But it would be a lie to say that I didn’t have any friends at all.

As is normal for people, I sought some form of companionship. One of my earliest memories is of me sitting in front of the mirror, having conversations with my friends who had names that I don’t remember anymore. While they never spoke to me and were only a fragment of my imagination, I held them close. Appa soon observed some of this and intervened.

Values as keepsakes

The photo is from a birthday party and you can see Kavi (the one feeding cake) and me (the one patiently sitting with clasped hands) wearing the same clothes. Appa established a simple rule: everything that Kavi does will be done by Vidhu as well, which also meant they wear identical pieces of clothing. I remember amma going to the shop, buying fabric, and asking the tailor to stitch the two dresses based on our sizes. Kavi was the apple of everyone’s eye. When Kavi joined karate classes, I did too. When Kavi went for athletics, I was enrolled as well. When Kavi went for Bharatnatyam classes, I wasn’t left behind. While my sister hated the fact that her sibling was shadowing everything she did, I saw the intentional effort that appa took, one of the few people in the family, to make me feel a sense of belongingness. 

Jyoti (who is wearing the striped dress on the cover photo of this blog), the daughter of our house help, who was a few years older than both of us, became my playmate. I never quite questioned why Jyoti was around almost all the time, but I was happy to have someone to play with, talk to, and learn alongside. Once, one of us said something to Jyoti differently than we would to each other, which appa observed. He sat us down for a conversation about respect and equal treatment for everyone, regardless of who they are, or where they come from. That this is a value that we should never let go of. This was also instilled when I was shifted from an all-girls school to a Protestant co-ed one in grade 5 where I went to church, listened to the scriptures, and was part of the choir - all of which contributed to my encounters with worlds very different from mine, yet equally kaleidoscopic.

Life, work, and its intersections

When I look back at my first few years in the corporate world, it wasn’t the DEI certifications that got me into working in this area. It was some of these values instilled in my mind that resulted in this passion to do something about it. I came across the terms Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, for the first time on Accenture’s (my workplace at the time) website. It was there that I learnt about LGBTQIA+ communities and their underrepresented relationship with the corporate world. Some of my early projects were on improving gender diversity in the workplace, understanding different cultures, and improving cultural sensitivity.   

You’ve never quite arrived if you’re working in DEI. From my time at Accenture to now, it has been a journey of unlearning and continued learning with the realisation that humans are complex in ways we cannot really fathom or even establish norms on. A Master’s degree in Psychology and the privilege of travelling to lands far away in my early twenties, meeting people who spoke in tongues I didn’t understand and seeing them express their love for someone beyond the gender binary, was initially shocking while also creating this realisation of the many differences that we hold - all of which makes us irreplaceably unique. 

As we grow up, the experiences that sediment within us create preferences and filters - both good and bad, such as the prejudice in the mind of the teacher who prevented me from dancing in school because she felt I was too dark-skinned. We never leave those parts and scars at home when we walk into our offices. 

At Ather Energy , we’ve been quick to realise the impact of some of these prejudiced preferences - also known as unconscious biases - that all of us hold. While we started with Competency-Based Interviewing, this is a step towards looking at another person as a whole, and not as a sum of the parts that they bring to the table. The focus towards facing one’s biases and acting on them through interventions isn’t limited to mitigating them during hiring and performance management, and rather to helping us be better people - both within and beyond the walls of our workplaces.

Looking beyond what's visible

When I joined Ather, DEI wasn’t at the forefront. But I observed diversity in the people who worked here, whether it was age or the experiences they brought, their ways of thinking not to forget our values which are about embracing all of us.

Last year, the formation of the DEI swimlane (our lingo for cross-functional teams), an outcome of our Culture Conversations, saw the same passion in people who came together from different functions not to chase an org OKR but to work towards intentionally building an inclusive organisation. Whether it’s about increasing the gender diversity ratio from 13 to 23% in one calendar year to the employment of around 70% of women at the Battery Plant of our Hosur Factory to re-hashing the domestic travel policy from a DEI lens, to exploring the possibility and challenges of bringing in persons with disabilities and veterans, there’s quite a list and there are many moonshots to go before anyone of us sleeps. 

With new blood joining our ranks, we have to shift gears and begin working towards building equitable workplaces before reaching an equal one, focusing on intersectionality and neurodiversity, and nurturing allyship out of the Human Resources department into the rest of the organisation. As a DEI practitioner, some of my moonshots reside in moving the needle in these directions. 

Mosaic is Ather's DEI philosophy. The individual pieces that create a mosaic might not seem remarkable by themselves, but as a cohesive whole, it can create a sense of wonder in the eyes of the beholder. I think of my loving father who dressed up his daughters identically, and enrolled them in the same dance classes, not because he believed everything should be the same, but to let them know that they both deserved the same opportunities. Equal, but not the same.  At Ather, we celebrate each of the unique pieces that come together to create this mosaic of people, all of whom are living and creating the Ather story. The future is one of joining extracurriculars that one needs and wants while making sure that everyone has the opportunity to work towards what they want.