Read this piece of news in my LinkedIn feed a few days ago and it brought to mind the first time ever I had read about Ms. Kochhar in the news. She was a rising star then and on the cover of some Indian magazine. She had cracked the glass ceiling; her name was on lists few women had been in before her - never mind a woman from India. Reading about her back in the day was particularly meaningful to me because of where things were in my life. Just about everything was falling apart and I was raising J alone in a foreign country.
I was such a far cry from Kochhar in every way including the fact that I could not make it work out for my family unit of two in India and had to come to America to have a shot at making it. She was thriving in the same country as a woman that I found so impossible to deal with. It would always make me wonder, what kind of inner resilience and native intelligence must a woman possess to achieve the things she was - in India. The bar for success is so much higher for women that she must be nearly invincible in every way to get there. Kochhar was everything I was not and it was fascinating to observe her from afar - imagine the art of the possible while being the same demographic. I rooted for her success because I needed to overcome some impossible odds on much smaller but deeply personal scale.
Elizabeth Holmes first came to limelight when my situation here had started to stabilize in many ways and I was looking forward to how my efforts might help J in the future. A young woman who was finding ways to challenge entrenched establishment and status quo was a heady story. As with Kochhar back in the day, I very much wanted to see Holmes succeed, wanted to believe these things are possible and women can be the ones to make it so. In light of all that has come to pass with these women, I feel disappointed and disillusioned.
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