A life of grit, valour

After her family threw out Zainab Patel onto the streets, “I begged and even had to sell my body to make ends meet.” That was the toughest phase of this transgender activist’s life in Mumbai, she said, addressing a plenary session at the Kochi Institute. Despite adversity, Zainab completed a Management course at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, and now holds an MBA in Human Resources, and has acquired over a decade’s experience working in a UN body. Here, “interactions with people, and seeing all the good, bad and ugly motivated me to start the NGO, ­Saksham Trust,” she said.

Institute Convenor RI Director Anirudha Roychowdhury presenting a memento to interior designer Annika Fernando. Also seen are (from L) LGBTQ activist Zainab Patel, Srimoyi Bhattacharya, founder, Peepul Advisory, and RID 3030 PDG Asha Venugopal.

Through the NGO she was engaged in empowering the LGBTQ ­community, sex workers, and providing help to migrant labourers, vulnerable women and children. She is also the founder of the Transformation Salon and Academy, which is managed by a team of transgenders, and The Trans Café, a restaurant that delivers 500 meals every day throughout Mumbai. She expressed her gratitude to RC Bombay for providing resources and help in setting up the two ventures. Zainab is also the Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity, and Culture (DEIC) leader of India ABO (Area Business Office) at Cummins.

Annika Fernando, an interior designer from Colombo, who comes from a family of mixed ethnic identity, thanks to her Dutch mother, said that when she migrated from ­Australia to Sri Lanka, she took to ­interior designing “to reflect the island’s historical legacy.” Her work conveys the “message of healing and peace as Sri Lanka has witnessed a civil war since the 1980s, and is now into reconciliation.” She, along with her sister, holds a grand exhibition in Colombo every year to mark the Black July 1983 massacre of Tamils “who were brutally killed by the armed forces,” she said.

Calling for regular people-to-people contact between Sri Lanka and India, she said, “Cultural exchanges will do a world of good for both nations.” Though the civil war is over, “the plight of Tamil plantation workers who moved from India around 250 years ago is still a concern,” and Sri Lanka with a “crazy past” is yet to fully resolve the differences and ill-will between the communities, she added.

 

Branding Rotary

It is time for Rotary to go for an image-makeover through collaborations with like-minded organisations such as the Agha Khan and Kochi Biennale Foundations for an aesthetic shift and branding to attract the youth towards Rotary clubs, said Sunil Vysyaprath, director, Motherland Joint Ventures, who designed the Make in India campaign in 2014.

Speaking on the topic of public image, the creative designer, credited with the promotion of IndiGo and Royal Enfield as iconic brands in India through successful advertising campaigns, recalled that after he was approached by the then Industries secretary Amitabh Kant “we created the Make in India as a platform, rather than an advertising campaign, to attract foreign investments and give a push to quality manufacturing through branding.” They built an interactive ecosystem in Make in India platform for a global experience with the help of the Central and state governments. “Art and design can push for better quality branding and thinking, and they also effect policy changes,” he said.

He recalled the Incredible India campaign in 2002 when “tourism was down, 9/11 terror attack had just happened, and travel embargo was in force for people travelling from this part of the world.” The campaign played the ‘brand aesthetically’ with an image shift from India as a land of snake charmers and superstitions. The world of branding has seen “massive changes since the 1990s as companies evolved from owning to sharing, ego to empathy, opacity to transparency.” For example, sports shoemakers, Nike has latched on to a simple tagline ‘Just do it’ to become part of the pop culture across the world cutting across sports, movies, fashion and lifestyles. “Now we associate Nike as a global brand, rather than just a shoe company.”

There are very few enterprises that are “truly enlightened as Rotary is with its hugely impactful work including its efforts for polio-free and hunger-free world.” But RI’s work needs to be better packaged with a lot of excitement built around it through collaborations, he said, and cited examples of TED Talks, and the Barack Obama’s presidential campaign 2008 through collaboration with a street artist Shepard Fairey who created a ‘Hope’ Obama poster that caught the imagination of voters to show that a branding requires an ‘aesthetic shift’ to be successful in reaching out to the targeted consumers.

Vysyaprath called for “making Rotary cool and acceptable to the younger generations” through collaborations for new aesthetics and vibrant energy.

Leave a Reply

Shares
Message Us